Spam
Walt Milligan and Dan deBeaubien, 6/4/2007
Distributed Computing Services purchased a new anti-spam solution and deployed it around Memorial Day. Most users should have noticed a substantial reduction in the spam delivered to them.
The spam solution is from a company called Ironport, which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems. It filters spam differently from the old Sophos system, which was clearly not meeting our needs. Ironport has an appliance that looks at all the incoming messages before they get to our mail server, and blocks those that it believes have a 90% chance of being spam. Spam is identified mainly by the reputation of the sending server, not by subject lines that spammers have figured out how to manipulate. If Ironport believes that there is a 50-90% chance that the message is spam, it places the message in your quarantine box and allows you to screen the messages.
The number of messages in your quarantine box is a very small fraction of the number of messages blocked by Ironport.
In the future, users will be able to set options. These options will include only accepting messages in English, declining anything related to drugs, etc. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Distributed Computing Services at email@mtu.edu