Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

UIS Takes Action to Guard Against Spam

University Information Services has chosen to install a spam blocklist service after finding that 20 percent of mail passing through the Georgetown e-mail system during a one week period is spam.

The university decided on a conservative blocklist called Spamhaus that is being used by other universities such as Stanford and Notre Dame, according to UIS. This blocklist service began on August 12 for all netidgeorgetown.edu addresses.

Any message identified as spam will not be processed by the GUMail system and therefore will never enter a user’s inbox.

“Spamhaus will not block all spam, just reduce it,” UIS director Beth Ann Bergsmark said.

Though some blocklist services are more effective at blocking all spam, these more comprehensive blocking mechanisms run the risk of blocking legitimate e-mail.

“Spamhaus is looking for patterns such as unsolicited bulk mail, or an identical message sent to thousands of individuals.” Bergsmark said. “It really isn’t about content.”

According to UIS, Spamhaus reports three false positives – legitimate e-mails wrongly discarded as spam – for every thousand messages that the system considers spam. Messages misclassified as spam never enter the system and are not retrievable.

“We felt that it was important to have everyone understand that false positives will occur,” Bergsmark said.

For every blocked message, the sender receives notification, and Spamhaus does allow individuals who were incorrectly categorized as spammers to ask for removal from the block list, which is updated several times daily.

UIS encourages students with full e-mail clients such as ozilla, Outlook or OS X Mail to use junk mail filters to stop spam that penetrates the blocklist.

According to UIS, the increased volume and traffic patterns that spam creates has affected the overall processing time for Georgetown mail. At the end of last semester, UIS increased the processing power of several components to address the increased capacity.

“As spam continues to rise we just can’t afford to keep upgrading and spending GU dollars to process more spam,” Bergsmark said.

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