ITC Announcement

Subject:  ITC Announcement of Campus Anti-Spam Solution
Date: Friday, April 16, 2004

As many of you know the CSUS Anti-Spam Workgroup has been meeting to recommend a solution to the Spam e-mail problem on campus.  The committee recommended that all e-mail messages coming onto campus would be rated in the e-mail header, and then individuals could create rules in their respective e-mail clients to either remove messages or move the messages to a separate "Spam" folder.

The original recommendation would have only RATED e-mail messages at the campus gateway.  However, a directive from Vice President of Academic Affairs, Ric Brown, stated we will "filter at the campus level as much as reasonably possible." 

Consistent with the recommendation by the Anti-Spam Workgroup, a new device will be installed at the campus gateway that will rate each incoming e-mail.  The rating will range from 0 – n, a 0 rating indicates the message has no Spam characteristics. The more Spam characteristics found the larger the rating value. Consistent with Vice President Brown’s directive, e-mail messages that are found to have a rating of 8.0 or higher will be filtered out and not delivered.

This device will come online on Tuesday, April 20.

The "machine" that will be performing this function is called a Barracuda Spam Firewall.  You can read more about this device at http://www.barracudanetworks.com.  The Barracuda Spam Firewall provides powerful and scalable Spam-blocking capabilities. It can handle over 10 million messages a day - filtering both Spam and viruses.

The recommended settings for the Barracuda are designed to insure delivery of valid mail and prevent delivery of blatant Spam.  The current settings are as follows:

• 0.0 - 3.4  e-mail will be delivered as normal.
• 3.5 - 7.9  e-mail will be delivered as normal with [BULK] added to the subject line.
• > 8.0 e-mail will not be delivered.

The [BULK] tag on the subject line of suspected Spam can be used to distinguish between valid messages and probable Spam messages at the client.  Additional information is added to the header of each delivered message, including the Spam rating.  The Spam rating may be used to further differentiate between valid and Spam messages, but should be used with caution, as Barracuda may change the format of these messages without notification.  For example: 

Action: Tagged
Reason: Score
Score: 5.3

If you have any questions or concerns please contact the Anti-Spam Workgroup.