Users of University e-mail servers should immediately notice a substantial decline in the amount of unsolicited e-mails they receive, Information Technology Services administrators announced Monday.
ITS implemented a new spam e-mail filter Monday on its main servers that will delete the vast majority of such messages, said Margaret Knox, director of collaboration and academic resources for ITS.
The filter, called Brightmail, deletes messages that it determines are spam before they are passed on to users' inboxes.
ITS tested Brightmail with a limited group of users at the University for four months and is very pleased with the results, Knox said.
"The feedback from testers is to move forward as quickly as possible," she said.
The tests have shown the program to be very accurate, and ITS has not received any complaints from participating users, Knox said.
Knox said more users have been complaining to ITS about spam recently, suggesting that advertisers are sending more unwanted messages and using more effective tactics to foil current anti-spam efforts.
ITS' previous efforts to fix the problem, such as maintaining a list of blocked senders, have not been effective, said Dan Updegrove, the University's vice president for information technology.
"The volume of spam getting through our manual filters was increasing, with concomitant drain on server processing capacity, central disk storage and user patience," he said. "We also had anecdotal reports of users overlooking or even deleting important messages, because of the number of spam messages they were receiving."
Knox said Brightmail works like an anti-virus program in that it updates its information from a database that continually creates and modifies rules for determining which messages are spam and which are not.
Though no program can eliminate all unwanted messages, Brightmail will delete the vast majority, Knox said.
The University's foremost concern is to avoid deleting any desired e-mails, and Brightmail only deletes one in a million such messages, Updegrove said in June.
"It should be noted, in this regard, that there's a trade-off between 'no false positives' and 'all spam identified.' We put emphasis on minimizing false positives, so some spam will still appear in user inboxes," he said.
Knox said administrators of the smaller, departmental e-mail servers also have the option to be included in Brightmail's protection, and several have told ITS of their interest in doing so.
Matt Jones, a finance junior, said he regularly checks his University e-mail account and is always annoyed by the advertisements.
"I'm definitely glad they're trying to do something about it," he said. "Spam wastes space and time and is really aggravating."
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