2008 Woodie Awards
No perfect solution for spam e-mails
Sydney Elliot
Issue date: 7/2/08 Section: News
Director for the Office of Information Technology, Duane Schiffman, goes to work every morning and spends about 15 minutes deleting spam e-mails, but he isn't complaining.
"The delete key and your finger is a wonderful thing," Schiffman said. "I come in every morning, and the first thing I do is hold down my shift key and hit delete … if I don't recognize who it is from I don't read it."
Although Schiffman isn't complaining about having to delete massive amounts of spam in his e-mails, some students and faculty have had issues with excessive spam e-mails.
Graduate student Dharmender Chauhan checks his e-mail several times a day, and each time he is hit with a new batch of spam e-mail.
"It isn't so bad, about five or six (spam messages)," Chauhan said. "I tried talking to someone at OIT, but they didn't really help me. They told me they would try and do something, but then nothing happened."
Schiffman said the university is doing everything they can to prevent spam e-mails from reaching SIUE Web mail users. According to Schiffman, before a recipient's messages reach their inbox, each message goes through a series of four tests.
The first of these tests is to check that the recipient is a valid SIUE e-mail address.
"We get spam that is sent to fred@siue.edu or sally@siue.edu," Schiffman said. "The first thing we do is look at who it is to, and look it up to see if it's valid. If it isn't valid we just toss it out."
After the message is deemed as valid, it goes through a screening process to determine whether or not the message is spam. If the message isn't considered spam, it moves into the newest type of filter. The new filter being used by the university to catch unwanted e-mails is a backscatter spam message.
Backscatter spam is created when a person corresponds with someone whose address book has been compromised. Someone who wants to create spam then takes the address the message was sent from and uses that address to "spam the world," Schiffman said.
"The delete key and your finger is a wonderful thing," Schiffman said. "I come in every morning, and the first thing I do is hold down my shift key and hit delete … if I don't recognize who it is from I don't read it."
Although Schiffman isn't complaining about having to delete massive amounts of spam in his e-mails, some students and faculty have had issues with excessive spam e-mails.
Graduate student Dharmender Chauhan checks his e-mail several times a day, and each time he is hit with a new batch of spam e-mail.
"It isn't so bad, about five or six (spam messages)," Chauhan said. "I tried talking to someone at OIT, but they didn't really help me. They told me they would try and do something, but then nothing happened."
Schiffman said the university is doing everything they can to prevent spam e-mails from reaching SIUE Web mail users. According to Schiffman, before a recipient's messages reach their inbox, each message goes through a series of four tests.
The first of these tests is to check that the recipient is a valid SIUE e-mail address.
"We get spam that is sent to fred@siue.edu or sally@siue.edu," Schiffman said. "The first thing we do is look at who it is to, and look it up to see if it's valid. If it isn't valid we just toss it out."
After the message is deemed as valid, it goes through a screening process to determine whether or not the message is spam. If the message isn't considered spam, it moves into the newest type of filter. The new filter being used by the university to catch unwanted e-mails is a backscatter spam message.
Backscatter spam is created when a person corresponds with someone whose address book has been compromised. Someone who wants to create spam then takes the address the message was sent from and uses that address to "spam the world," Schiffman said.
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