UITS fights spam with filter service

Beginning Oct. 17, all IU e-mail accounts will become equipped with automatic spam protection. \nAbout 80 percent of e-mail is unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly referred to as spam, said Rick Jackson, University Information Technology Services messaging manager.\nUITS will implement a system that sends spam directly to a special junk e-mail folder that automatically deletes it after five days, he said.\n"We have (the system) fairly well-tuned," Jackson said. "We have been running this service for approximately five years, so we find very few false positives," he said, explaining that a false positive is a message identified as spam that is actually valuable to the recipient. \nThe filter system has been available in the past, but users were required to voluntarily register for the service before it was implemented.\nSophomore Jared Johnson said he didn't even know about the availability of the current filter. He said he receives a lot of "phishing" e-mail, where senders copy a company and try to trick users to steal personal information, such as credit card and bank account numbers.\n"I get stuff from lotteries," senior Liz Banich said. "I won big money in Russia and Japan."\nBanich said she just started receiving spam within the past six months and said she doesn't understand how people, supposedly from different countries, get her address. She said thinks the implementation of the spam filtering system across the board is a good idea.\n"(Spam) is a very lucrative business," Jackson said.\nHe said there are some laws that regulate spam, but the people who send the spam might not live under the jurisdiction of the laws, as many spammers do not live in Indiana or even in the United States. The fact that they use fake names and addresses makes it even harder to hold them accountable.\nSpam dramatically raises the cost of e-mail, not just at IU, but across the Internet, Jackson said. Though the filter has been available for a few years, very few people enrolled in it every year because they were forced to find it and register for it, he said.\nUnder the current system, if people have spam in their mailboxes, they might not even identify it for a few days, and even if they do, the message is still saved on IU's storage disks for several more days. But the new system will immediately identify junk mail and get rid of it faster.\n"For IU, the last e-mail update cost $1.7 million," Jackson said. "Almost $900,000 was for storage."\nThe new implementation of the spam filter will free up a lot of disk space, Jackson said. When spam is disposed of efficiently, there is more disk space, and IU doesn't have to buy more disk space as often, he said.\nWhile this automatic filter system is solely for Webmail, other users can benefit from a different filter, Native protection, that comes with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange, other e-mail systems available for users with an IU account.