One of the most frequently heard complaints on campus: “I get sooooo much SPAM!!” Well, help is on the way! For some time, the Information Technology Department has been researching various solutions for SPAM control. The price tags for such appliances were enormous and the budget was not available. However, one vendor stepped forward with a much more reasonably priced solution and provided a 30 day trial.

A group was formed of several users on campus who regularly receive countless SPAM emails every day. This group included Chris Devine, Carey Libertini, Gail McDonough, Andra Tokarsky, Sue Winstel, and most of the I.T. staff. Throughout the month of December, the group helped test the anti-SPAM appliance, and helped to fine-tune the settings. We thank the group for their help and investment of time. They reported that they experienced good results – while not every message was caught, a significant reduction in SPAM occurred. Gail McDonough recently said “the new program has significantly reduced the amount of SPAM I receive daily!”

The program works by examining each email that comes in from external addresses and applying a ‘score’ to that email based upon known profiles of SPAM email. If the score is low, the email is passed on to the recipient as normal. If the score is just a little questionable, the email is tagged with the word ‘[Bulk]’ in the subject line. If the score falls into a middle range, the email is ‘quarantined’ and if the score is excessive the email is blocked from delivery entirely.

Since December, the program has already been working on behalf of the community by blocking high-scoring SPAM email.

Since we put the appliance in ‘test mode’, the appliance has successfully blocked over 60,000 messages that would have otherwise been delivered to the Carlow campus community. This ranges from a minimum of 500 daily to a peak of 1,600 messages daily. In addition, members of the test group had an average of 7 messages quarantined daily.

The savings was significant! Overall, the test group found the software to be easy to use. However, to help the community under-stand how the software works, the I.T. department has created a quick sheet on how to examine the quarantine area. This helpful information can be found here. Of course, you can also call our helpdesk if you have additional questions.

Once the appliance is turned on for the entire community (on February 17th) , we will be able to better tune the settings and hope to be able to significantly reduce the amount of