Enterprise Information Technology Services Press Release
The University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

WRITER: Bert DeSimone, 706/542-5110, bert@uga.edu
CONTACT: Greg Ashley, 706/542-5110, gashley@uga.edu

Update: Spam Filtering on UGAMail

ATHENS, Ga.— As everyone is aware, the rate of spam has drastically increased over the past several years and has risen to unprecedented levels in the past few months. According to an October 27, 2006, article that appeared in Security Focus News, estimates are as a high as a 450% increase in spam over the 8 months preceding that article. The increase is due in part to the increased use of "botnets," which are networks of compromised PCs, as the originating point for the spam. Instead of single computers sending out spam, spammers are using the resources of thousands of computers to send out millions of spam messages. Spam is also increasingly more difficult to detect by spam filters, since spammers are using embedded images and other techniques to get past the spam recognition programs.

The tools used on UGAMail have resulted in a tremendous reduction in spam messages that would have otherwise found their way into user inboxes. Based upon current data, these tools stop over 1.5 BILLION spam messages from reaching UGAMail inboxes annually. On a typical day there are about 4.9 million attempts to send email to UGAMail, but about 4.3 million of these messages are classified as junk mail. Without spam filtering, current trends indicate that each UGAMail user would receive an additional 50-100 junk mail messages in their inbox on average each day. EITS, responsible for the University's core networks and infrastructure, constantly monitors spam on UGAMail recognizing the problems that spam can cause students, faculty, and staff by clogging up email inboxes—and because of the detrimental affect it has on the UGAMail system itself.

Recognizing the due-diligence effort, EITS is aware of a small number of cases where UGAMail users did not receive an expected email -- these are typically known as false positives when caused by anti-spam measures. Although these are rare, this situation is taken very seriously and the goal is to eliminate false positives from occurring. However, although diligent in minimizing false positives by following industry best practice, it is unfortunate that currently they are inevitable in combating spam on UGAMail or on any email system. Additionally, in many cases when an expected email message does not arrive it is due to factors other than spam filtering, such as mistyped email addresses, failures on the sending server, improperly constructed mail filters created by individual users, and similar situations.

Steven Baker, a senior writer for Business Week, recently summed the situation up in the following comment ..."strategists, struggling with spam detection, face a nasty choice: They either pelt us with lots of spam, or they take out a big chunk of it—including a certain number of false positives." Similarly, Andrew Lochart, Director of Product Marketing with the spam bi locking service Postini was recently quoted in several online 100 percent of spam with no false positives."

If you suspect that an intended email message has not arrived, contact the EITS Help Desk as soon as possible (706-542-3106). The UGAMail administrators have very detailed logs and, upon request, will attempt to locate any messages that seem to have gone astray. Please note, however, that due to disk storage constraints only two weeks of logs are kept. It is important to also remember that in the event that troubleshooting requires the cooperation of the administrators of remote email servers, they often face similar limitations with regard to logs of past events.

Recognizing the issue, and the desire to provide the highest level of service and support possible, EITS has investigated additional options and plans to offer an alternative for faculty, students, and staff to individually select a less stringent spam filtering process when the next version of UGAMail is deployed later this spring. EITS will provide more information on this option when it becomes available this spring. Individuals who select this option, however, will likely have significantly more junk mail messages in their inbox.

For additional information regarding UGAMail and spam, please see:

http://www.ugamail.uga.edu

About EITS
The Office of the Chief Information Officer and Enterprise Information Technology Services (EITS) are committed to the mission of UGA as a land-and-sea-grant institution where academics come first and the research extensive university community encourages research efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels. To that end, under the direction of the University´s Chief Information Officer, EITS endeavors to provide a robust, reliable, and secure information technology infrastructure, maintain essential production services, and offer world-class support. For more information, please visit the EITS Web site: www.eits.uga.edu.