New SPAM rules to go live on staff email

Auto deletion of high-scoring SPAM will start on 20th June

 

You may recall that, on 7th April 2008, Information Services announced a pilot to test the viability of automatically deleting incoming email messages which had a high probability of being spam (see our SPAM pilot web page for details).

 

Users were invited to send feedback on the pilot. An analysis of the feedback received follows:

A total of 51 responses were received from 36 staff members.
16 responses contained queries about email which were not relevant to the purpose of the pilot. These were passed to various IS staff to be dealt with.
9 responses were messages of support for the proposals.
23 responses related to false positives which scored between 5 and 15. Messages in this category will not be auto deleted under the proposed scheme and will be easier to identify in the Junk Email folder when the high scoring spam is no longer there.
3 responses related to false positives which scored 15 or over. These messages would be auto deleted.

 

The headers that were sent were analysed resulting in two modifications to the spam detection rules to reduce the scores. Users were provided with advice for their correspondents on how to reduce the risk of their messages being deleted rather than delivered.

 

During the period of the pilot (10 April to 11 June) over 19 million messages were processed by the spam detection system resulting in only three high scoring false positives being reported. This is considered to be such a small risk that Information Services will proceed with the proposal. With effect from Friday 20 June 2008 all inbound email messages which score 15 or more on the spam check will be deleted by the email service rather than being delivered to the recipient.

 

Alan Richardson
Systems and Network Services Manager