Information Services Newsletter
Introduction of Anti-Spam, Anti-email Virus Infrastructure

Globally the growth in number of Spam emails has now exceeded the quantity of legitimate email, and a considerable number of these now include viruses that can significantly impact the working of organisations – during the SoBig email virus outbreak of August 2003 some University staff were in receipt of over 500 copies of the virus per day. The impact of this trend on the University has seen mailboxes filling with growing quantities of un-solicited email.

In response to this problem the Information and ICT Committee approved the introduction of a policy to provide automated anti-spam and email virus content filtering on incoming and outgoing email messages. Appropriate funding for the service was secured and a pilot service based on PureMessage has been in operation since the start of August 2003.

The pilot service was used to investigate the accuracy of the Spam message detection and modifies the subject line of suspected Spam messages and delivers them to the end user who can then use email client rules to decide how the messages should be handled. This pilot has shown that the service can correctly identify over 90% of Spam messages and all recent email viruses. This service was extended to all University email service users at the end of September 2003 as a result of the outbreak of the SWEN email worm.

Messages suspected of being SPAM are presently being identified and delivered to the inbox of mail users, documentation on how to use these identifiers and further information on the PureMessage service can be found at:

 http://www.ulster.ac.uk/isd/ciis/docs/antispam

Andrew Gregg