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Faculties & Departments
Computer Centre
Combating SPAM Email at NUI Maynooth-An Update
Spam
Spam is one of the biggest problems that all email users worldwide, at home, in industry and education have to deal with.
You may be surprised to learn that 75%-95% of all email messages received by any organization is spam. It has been shown that the best detection rate that can be achieved realistically is 95%, but even this is not always possible, due to the changing nature of spam and the evolving technology and techniques used by spammers to evade detection. The rules to detect and filter spam need to be updated regularly to allow for new tricks employed by the spammers.
Recently, we have seen a considerable increase in the amount of spam that is being sent to individual users. Most of this is trapped by Copperfasten and quarantined but, inevitably, given the volume of spam, more unwanted messages are finding their way into individual inboxes.
Three years ago we installed Copperfasten, a solution to combat spam that has proved to be extremely successful. Copperfasten, which is supplied by an Irish company based in Galway, is a popular, cost-effective solution that has been installed in a number of other 3rd level institutions, including DCU, RCSI, and WIT and also in companies such as Forfas, TG4 and Bank of Scotland Ireland. Many of our users have contacted us, declaring their satisfaction with this service, particularly when it was introduced originally, as the improvement was obvious immediately.
In the past, quite a large number of people in the University received little or no spam. The main reason for this is that their email addresses have not become public and, therefore, have not been targeted by the spammers. Email addresses that have become public will not only be the recipient of unwanted email but can also be used by the spammers as fake addresses from which spam messages are sent. Email addresses can become public in many ways, for example, on web pages, from mailing lists, from registration forms etc. Even with vigilance, it is very difficult to prevent an address from becoming public, if it has existed for a long time.
There are some measures that can be put in place to cut down on spam.
Anti-spam filters work by assigning a spam score to each message, based on certain rules that are developed over time and are continually revised and refined. We have set a spam detection threshold of 5 i.e. any messages with a spam score of 5 or more will be blocked. Most of the spam messages that slip through have a spam score of 4.8-4.9. We can decrease the spam detection threshold for an individual user to 4.8, for example. However, this would increase the chance that a genuine message would be blocked and the onus would be on the user to check the quarantine report carefully to ensure that no important messages are lost.
Dealing with spam is an ongoing battle and we are continually on the lookout for better ways to combat it but, unfortunately, there will never be a perfect solution.