Phishing and Spam Reduction
Due to the overwhelming number of requests for assistance with phishing (electronic scam messages) and spam reduction, the Office of the Vice Provost for Information Technology (IT) is testing a variety of mechanisms that block Spam and Scam email attacks on the campus mail systems.
These mechanisms are devised to identify mail servers sending verified phishing and spam messages and block all messages from those servers.
Is it really a big problem?
Currently Rice IT processes over a million email messages per day. Between 80 and 90 percent of the email that is processed is defined as spam and phishing (electronic scam) email. Spam is defined as unsolicited bulk email similar to junk mail that you receive in the regular post. Scam or phishing emails are generally more insidious in that they attempt to elicit personal identity information or money from the recipient. Rice has had a number of people fall prey to scam and phishing email, which has escalated the efforts to make these changes.
How does it work?
Sophisticated sorting programs identify servers that spew verified phishing and spam messages and add the server's address to real time blacklists, also known as simply "blacklists." The Rice mail servers cross reference several of these blacklists and if a server is listed on multiple blacklists, mail from that server is blocked and is never delivered to Rice recipients.
What you should experience with blacklists in place at Rice is an immediate reduction in the amount of phishing and spam email that you normally receive. This in turn will reduce the overall volume of email you receive.
You should NOT see a decrease in the amount of good email. In our prior testing, we have NOT encountered the loss of ANY valid email.
DSPAM
DSPAM helps identify and decrease spam on an individual basis. DSPAM is an optional spam identification and quarantine or tagging tool. It places the notiaion ***SPAM*** in the subject line of some email messages. These messages were tagged because the content of the message had a high statistical likelihood of containing spam (see the Spam Assassin web page for details on how this tool works
The spam identification tool does not have the capability to prevent delivery of messages to your Rice email account.
Different tools in the tool box
By providing server-side tools such as blacklists and individual account tools like Spam Assassin and DSPAM, Rice is striving to mitigate the effects of phishing and spam on all community members. As additional spam and phishing reduction tools become available, IT is committed to investigating these applications in order to decrease the quantity of junk email in Rice inboxes.
For questions on phishing and spam reduction, contact the Help Desk at 713-348-HELP (x4357).
