Enterprise Information Technology Services Press Release
The University of Georgia
Athens, Georgia

OCIO-> EITS-> Press Releases

Wednesday, December 6, 2006

WRITER: Bert DeSimone bert@uga.edu, 706-542-5359
CONTACT: Greg Ashley gashley@uga.edu, 706-542-5110

EITS implements additional UGAMail spam reduction tool

ATHENS, Ga.— Over the past several months, spam has increased worldwide by an estimated 300% and now makes up about 90% of all email traffic on the Internet. As a result of this increase and changes in the type of spam, UGAMail has seen drastic increases in spam that have resulted in more spam messages reaching UGAMail users' inboxes. Additionally, spam sent as an image rather than text has increased dramatically in 2006 and is becoming more sophisticated to confuse anti-spam software.

Therefore, EITS will implement a new anti-spam software tool called MailHurdle on Thursday, December 7, 2006. This is the next step in an ongoing comprehensive strategy aimed at reducing the amount of spam reaching UGAMail inboxes.

EITS has historically utilized numerous anti-spam software applications that have typically stopped more than 90% of inbound spam from reaching users' inboxes. However, given the recent increase in spam and the new sophisticated techniques used by spammers, more spam is now getting through. Spammers have, in the past, sent messages from a single server, but increasingly the spam emanates from networks of compromised individual PCs, known as "bot nets." MailHurdle is expected to substantially reduce the spam coming from such networks.

Currently, more than 4.2 million messages a day are sent to UGAMail users. Approximately 2.5 million of these messages are blocked by EITS before they are even processed by UGAMail, since EITS is able to determine that they are sent by known spammers. Of the remaining 1.7 million messages that do enter the UGAMail system, approximately 900,000 are detected as spam by UGAMail's internal spam filtering system and sent to individual junk mail folders.

EITS will closely monitor email delivery after MailHurdle is implemented to assess the effectiveness of this tool and to check for problems. If you have questions about MailHurdle and spam, or would like additional information, please contact the EITS Help Desk ( helpdesk@uga.edu / 706-542-3106).

EITS Mission
The Office of the Chief Information Officer and Enterprise Information Technology Services (EITS) are committed to the mission of UGA as a land-and-sea-grant institution where academics come first and the research extensive university community encourages research efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels. To that end, under the direction of the University´s Chief Information Officer, EITS endeavors to provide a robust, reliable, and secure information technology infrastructure, maintain essential production services, and offer world-class support.