Anti-spam Update - March 2005
Summary: Message sent out to the Computing Support Coordinators Group (CSC) on March 17, 2005 regarding OIT' efforts to combat spam.
Date: Thursday, March 17, 2005 11:30 AM -0800
From: "E. Scott Menter"
To: UCI Computer Support Coordinators Group
Subject: Anti-Spam Update
Our [UCI-DISCARD?] trail has been running very well. Overall, we think we're seeing a true false positive rate of around one in ten million messages, once we weeded out some early trouble spots.
We have not proceeded with automatically dropping these messages, however. It is still our plan to do so; however, we have been able to accelerate some of our other anti-spam plans, and we'd like to implement these new approaches first.
As a next step, we will deploy a "cocktail" of anti-spam techniques. All of these approaches will use RFC-compliant, widely known and understood methods for identifying spam and refusing to accept it. As a result, any sender of a legitimate message misidentified as spam will receive a standard notification that his message was not delivered.
Because these techniques offer notification to senders, they represent a solution that is preferable to the planned silent discard of spam. We anticipate, based on metrics we have compiled over the past couple of months, that the vast majority of spam will be identified and blocked using these new methods.
We are working on documentation for this new system; I will make an announcement here when it becomes available. We have already built one of the two servers that will be used for this process, and our testing is about to begin. If all goes well, we will have the system in full production by the end of April.
Please direct your questions and concerns to us at <OIT@uci.edu> or
x4-2222. Thank you.
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Scott Menter
OIT
