At the last meeting of the E-mail Selection Committee (yes we are meeting), we discussed the new anti-spam system EMU is using. Tonight (01/24/08) I received an email from ICT sharing some stats on the system performance. So I thought I share with all of you….
From ICT:
The system was brought online on January 4, 2008. Between that date and tonight (01/24/08), the system has:
1. Rejected more than 86,000,000 messages from known spammers using reputation database technology. The reputation database collects data about e-mail messages from around the globe (billions each day) to identify spammers. Once a spammer is added to the reputation database, messages from that known spammer are then rejected from our system. The database is constantly updated from the vendor that provided the system.
2. Rejected more than 235,400 messages with bad recipient addresses. These are messages that are addressed to EMU e-mail addresses that do not exist.
3. Marked more than 1,700,000 messages as SPAM. These messages did not come from known spammers, but the message body included some set of characteristics that are typically associated with SPAM messages.
4. Removed 232 messages found to be infected with a virus.
5.Delivered more than 2,900,000 messages to EMU mailboxes that the system believed to be legitimate e-mail.
In summary, in less than a month, EMU has received almost 92,000,000 e-mail messages. Of which, more than 93% were rejected because they were coming from e-mail systems that are reputed spammers.
92M e-mail messages calculates out to be upwards of 3,500 e-mail messages for every student, faculty and staff member on campus this term.
I share this information to help clarify the scope/scale of e-mail today. I’m hopeful that all of you have noticed a very significant reduction in SPAM coming into your mailboxes over the past three weeks.
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I would just like to say that ICT should get some credit for working very hard to stop spam! Lets give credit where credit is due.
Thanks Chris, for the info. As a matter of fact I have noticed a marked reduction in the amount of spam I receive and I was wondering why. So yes, it seems to be working pretty well! Way to Go ICT folks!
So, what system has EMU chosen? How much is it costing them? Who is on this committee? Are the meetings open to the public? What are they exactly meeting for? What’s the charge of this committee?
All good questions, Mike. Chris, this is the first evidence I have from anyone that this committee has met and/or exists.
Of course, I haven’t noticed any differences since I filter all of my email through, er, a different service…
Oh, and I do agree/believe that the problem with spam for an institution like EMU has got to be enormous. I don’t have any spam filter for the emutalk email, and I routinely have to delete 30-50 messages a day. And that’s just on this little account!
ICT should share those statistics widely, maybe emailing everyone. No, wait, that would be cosnidered SPAM.
Annnd no response yet to my questions.