Washington Week: Student Voices (O)

U. Virginia installs anti-spam software for university e-mail accounts
By Thomas Madrecki
Cavalier Daily (U. Virginia)
11/15/2006

(U-WIRE) CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — A new spam control system has been recently implemented by the University of Virginia Information Technology and Communications for all electronic mail accounts on the University's Central Mail Service.

The system, designed by IronPort Systems of California, will offer an unprecedented level of spam blocking at the University and allow Central Mail Service users to set their own personal levels of spam-stopping stringency.

According to James Hilton, vice president and information officer of ITC, the IronPort spam software was purchased in response to the ever-increasing levels of spam and the declining effectiveness of current spam-prevention solutions. Hilton also noted that IronPort lowers the chance of "real" e-mails being misidentified as spam by the anti-spam system.

"At least in my experience, the performance of this new system is dramatically better," Hilton said. "Even with the default setting, I don't have to worry about what might be spam or what is not spam."

Liz Landis, director of public relations at IronPort, said IronPort offers a "multi-layered defense against spam," blocking possibly harmful or harassing e-mails with a "series of unique spam-stopping filters."

IronPort anti-spam software, according to Landis, analyzes incoming e-mails and submits them to a thorough filter review. First, a "sender reputation" filter checks the sender of any e-mail. Then, the Context Adaptive Scanning Engine examines the context of the message. Once an e-mail goes through these filters, it generates a combined spam score, which indicates the likelihood that the e-mail is spam.

"Spam is a constantly evolving problem," Landis said. "First, it was easy — an e-mail would say 'Viagra,' or 'sex' ... Then, they got a little better, changing the 'a' in Viagra to an at sign, for example. IronPort security, however, does not just look at the content of e-mails — it looks at the reputation of the sender."

At the University, Hilton said e-mails with a spam score exceeding individual stringency settings will be placed in a CMS mail folder called "uva-potential-spam." Hilton said the default security setting is moderate; however, users can raise or lower this number to change the permissiveness of the spam-blocking software.

Hilton said CMS users do not have to do anything to take advantage of the new IronPort anti-spam software, adding that the "reputation" feature will not go into effect until next semester, when the University will add IronPort spam-blocker to all University e-mail services.

Second-year College student Will Gray said he is glad to hear that the University is doing something about "the spam problem."

"I get between 15 and 20 unsolicited e-mails per week," Gray said. "It's ridiculous, the amount of garbage that gets through. I don't think anything can stop all the spam, but I hope this will help."

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