OIT has stepped up its efforts to eradicate SPAM, but it's a stubborn problem that will never completely go away.
For one thing, said Jack Suess, Vice President for IT, 20 percent of the SPAM the UMBC community receives is from phishing scams, and SPAM filters don't block addresses that look legitimate.
Phishing is the practice of sending SPAM from e-mail addresses that appear to be legitimate and asking users to provide personal information, often to "verify" or "update" an account. Ebay and Amazon are among the return addresses used in Phishing scams. And since those are legitimate company names, SPAM filters won't block them.
However, OIT has made changes that are helping to block other forms of SPAM. In late January, filters were set to automatically reject messages that had a high score as likely SPAM.
While some faculty members have complained that some legitimate mail could be blocked, Suess said the change was necessary because of the huge volume of unsolicited, unwanted e-mail that passes through UMBC's mail servers each day.
The university receives approximately 500,000 inbound e-mail messages every day. Between 60-70 percent, or as many as 350,000, appear to be SPAM. Many messages are filtered into Spam folders where users have the opportunity to review them to assure they really are unwanted e-mail.
Messages more than 21 days old that have been labeled as SPAM are deleted from campus e-mail accounts. This is necessary, Suess said, because of the huge amount of space those unwanted, unread messages consumer on UMBC's mail servers.
Suess said OIT continues to monitor and re-evaluate the SPAM problem, and will continue to look for innovative solutions for blocking unwanted e-mail.