Killin’ That Spam
Winter 2006
Links to Stories:
University Information Systems Project
News Bytes from the Wilds of Technyland
Kim’s Column—Just What Is UCS?
Editor-in-Chief: Kim Tracy, Executive Director of University Computing
Managing Editor: Anna Brown, Computer Literacy Training Coordinator
Special Thanks to:
Tony Pina, Center for Teaching and Learning, for the update on Blackboard.
Please send all comments, questions, and exclamations to trainme@neiu.edu.
If you’re anything like me, you get lots and lots of spam e-mails that you never asked for and would never want. I’ve heard the same story from lots of people here that get dozens and even hundreds of spam e-mails every day. University Computing is working on deploying a solution to this problem that will eliminate the vast majority of the spam received through NEIU e-mail accounts. This same solution is used at other organizations and employees don’t miss e-mails because of it. If you have had the same e-mail address for a long time, you probably get a lot of spam because that address is well known and likely sold and re-sold to those that send spam.
This new antispam solution, called Brightmail, works by examining inbound e-mail for spam-like characteristics; when the e-mail exceeds a certain threshold of characteristics, it is designated known spam. These are the e-mails that are almost certainly spam. This solution has a secondary category to catch more spam and to allow users the ability determine whether it is spam or not. This second category is called likely spam. You will not see the known spam messages at all, which means you will receive significantly less spam messages. You will occasionally see messages that have been quarantined. These are likely spam messages that you may wish to review to see if you would like to receive any of the messages. In practice, you should also find that these likely spam messages are also unwanted; they will be cleared from the quarantine automatically after a period of time.
The Brightmail system keeps up with new spamming techniques by getting regular updates from the software provider, much like getting a new virus definition file for your antivirus software. This new solution should really help in eliminating that spam without preventing the delivery of any mail that you would like to receive.