Users of UTORmail will soon have a better way of blocking spam, or unsolicited email, from coming into their mailboxes. This follows the approval of a $100,000 budget for anti-spam software last June.
Users currently have the option to filter out unsolicited mail by using the blacklist function. But this is not very effective as it only blocks the individual addresses you’ve blacklisted. Spammers change their addresses all the time.
According to Alex Nishri, network services supervisor with Computing & Network Services, users of the current UTORmail package do not have a lot of protection against spam. The new anti-spam software will have the ability to look through individual messages, identify spam from other mail, and put it into a separate folder. Messages in this folder will be automatically deleted after a period of time. However, users may choose not to put spam into a separate folder so that they can still look through their entire inbox.
“It’s not a perfect science,” said Nishri about anti-spam software in general.
Spammers are very crafty. Some programs that track spam look for certain commonly used words, like mortgage or Viagra. But spammers often disguise these words. If they misspell Viagra, for example, it may escape the radars of some anti-spam software, explains Nishri. Spammers have lots of time to come up with new techniques.
It is next to impossible to trace the sources of spam. “Spam is a moving target,” says Norman Housley, manager of network design and implementation services at U of T. “By the time you trace the [sources], they may have moved the origin.” Or, as Nishri adds, a spammer may be located in the U.S., but the messages they send appear to come from Asia.
U of T has had a similar problem. There have been incidents where spammers sent out junk mail to people both within and outside the campus community, but made it look like the mail came from U of T.
“We designed the post office to handle so many messages per hour, then all of a sudden we found ourselves getting three times as much,” says Nishri. The huge volume of spam overwhelmed the post office. The system experienced a serious backlog, resulting in mail delivery that was many hours late.
The software that will soon be implemented will constantly come up with new ways to identify spam by means of updates, in the same way that anti-virus software relies on updates to track new viruses. Housley and Nishri speculate that anti-spam functions will be available to UTORmail users by December.
Nishri stresses that this software will only block spam, it will not block viruses. Spam often comes with attachments, and the safe thing to do is to delete the mail right away, as the attachments are often viruses.
