Tired of Spam? New Mail Filtering Will Help

On Monday, June 16, AcIS will deploy new spam-filtering technology which should catch more spam before it arrives in your mailbox. By Tuesday you should see a significant decrease in the number of unwanted messages that show up in your inbox.

The new program works by scanning messages for certain key words (such as "urgent" or "business opportunity"), characteristics (such as a large number of letters in all caps), and formatting (such as use of fonts and colored text) and assigning a score to each item.

These scores are added together to create a total score for the message; messages with scores over a pre-determined threshold will be bounced, so you won't see them in your inbox.

After months of testing, AcIS is confident that this threshold has been set high enough to reject little if any legitimate email, while still allowing us to reject a significant amount of spam. Messages with spam scores below the threshold will be delivered to you normally. (We hope to have a tool you'll be able to use to adjust your own personal "spam threshold" by September 2003.)

You do not need to worry about legitimate mail that you send being accidentally caught in the new filters. Messages sent from Pine, Cubmail, University mailing lists on CUVMC, the "Central" Exchange server, or from any PC sending mail through the Columbia authenticated server (send.columbia.edu) will not be scanned.

In all likelihood, you will still receive some spam. With the diverse population of Columbia affiliates, we cannot tell with absolute certainty what mail each recipient wants and doesn't want. Therefore, in order to deliver all your legitimate mail we are likely to deliver some spam as well. If you receive spam, you can just delete it, or you can forward it to spam@columbia.edu and include full headers. We will use examples of spam that make it through the filters to try and improve the filters even more.

Scope of the Problem

If you use email you've certainly noticed, and probably have been annoyed by, the significant, and troubling, rise in the number of unsolicited and unwanted commercial email messages, more popularly known as "spam". This has become a time-consuming and costly problem, both for individuals and for organizations such as Columbia.

Spam is usually associated with bogus get-rich schemes, explicit sexuality, or generally questionable advertising, and can even contain computer viruses.

According to a recent CNN article, the amount of spam is increasingly rapidly; last year, about 1 in 12 mail messages were spam, but this year spam is predicted to exceed legitimate email. A New York Times article on spam quotes America Online (AOL) as stating that about 70 percent of the total mail messages its customers receive are spam.

How'd They Get My Email Address?

Spammers have become very sophisticated in the methods they use to obtain electronic mail addresses. Among these methods are:

Software programs that search the Internet, including Web sites and chat groups, looking for email addresses to spam.
"Dictionary attacks" to try sending to possible name combinations at large ISPs or email services, to see from the response which are user unknown (with this method, spammers can find thousands of addresses).
Purchasing and selling lists of email addresses.

According to analysis by the Center for Democracy and Technology, email addresses posted on Web sites or in newsgroups attract the most spam.

What Can I Do to Prevent Spam?

Currently there is no foolproof way to prevent spam. However, there are some things you can do to possibly reduce the amount of spam you receive:

It is recommended that you don't reply to spam unless the mail is from a company with whom you're familiar. Be sure the company offers you the opportunity to unsubscribe from their mailing list.
Don't buy anything from a spammer.
Try to minimize the number of web pages containing your email address to reduce the likelihood that spammers can obtain your address. Spammers sometimes use programs that travel through all web sites on the Internet (much like a search engine) and "harvest" any email addresses they find on web pages.

For More Help

There are many excellent resources on the Internet committed to combating the problem of unsolicited, unwanted mail. See Related Sites for a list of some of these resources.

If you feel threatened in any way by a spam message or any other email, contact security@columbia.edu.

For general questions about spam, please contact the Helpdesk at 212-854-1919. You can also send email to consultant@columbia.edu, or stop by the Computing Support Center at 202 Philosophy.