ITS Anti-Spam Service is Coming Soon

By Information Technology Services

This is the second article in a three part series to prepare the UH community for the upcoming Information Technology Service anti-spam service. The first article is available in the News@UH archives.

By some accounts, spam is expected to quintuple annually. Efforts by purveyors of free e-mail accounts have resulted in aggressive anti-spam measures that are effective, but also suspected of interfering with correspondence. The anti-spam strategy for UH is designed primarily to ensure that no e-mail is lost. E-mail is considered critical information and by design critical information should not be at risk.

The ITS anti-spam services will offer a limited number of features to help the UH community avoid spam. These features include:

• Spam Tagging—All incoming mail to @hawaii.edu mail servers is scanned for a variety of characteristics that indicate a mail is spam. If enough of these characteristics are found, the mail is tagged as spam. Mail tagged as spam can be easily identified by the subject line, which will be prefixed with [spam?].

• Automatic Spam Suppression—The ITS anti-spam service will provide an option that will reduce the amount of spam in your inbox. This feature is not automatic and must be selected. When automatic spam suppression is active, suspected spam is written to your junk-mail folder—created automatically as needed—so that you have the opportunity to view spam and determine that suppressed mail is indeed spam. The junk-mail folder has the following characteristics: spam remains in this folder for only 14 days before being deleted and the folder holds only 5Mb of spam with the oldest messages being deleted as necessary to maintain the 5Mb limit. These features help protect your mail by ensuring that spam does not exhaust your mail quota.

The ITS Anti-Spam Service was developed with one additional criteria in mind, the suppression of spam considered to be particularly offensive by a vocal segment of the UH community—graphic porn. The perpetrators of spam are in an arms race with the developers of anti-spam software. ITS is estimating that these prevention measures, at least initially, will nearly eliminate graphic porn and will cut down approximately 25–50 percent of overall spam received. There will never be a time when 100 percent of spam will be blocked.

The ITS Anti-Spam Service is being readied for general release by the end of January 2003. In the last article of this series, the ITS anti-spam service Web page will be announced along with the date that the service is to be enabled. In the meantime, you can read more about SpamAssassin and what it means for the UH community.