Spam is the electronic form of junk mail consisting of commercial advertising, often for questionable products, get-rich-quick schemes or quasi-legal services. At the minimum, spam is an annoyance because e-mail users have to spend time to sort through and delete the messages. But to appreciate the magnitude of the problem of spam, think of how many messages a day you get, and then multiply that by the number of FAU e-mail users (approximately 30,000). It is estimated that 50-75% of all e-mail coming into the university mail servers is spam. Every one of those messages is taking up space on the mail servers, and it takes time to deliver each message as well. But the real damage of spam goes beyond its consumption of resources; some spammers are now using the method for identity theft.

Spam and Identity Theft

It can't be said too often: Never give your personal information via an e-mail. No legitimate business, especially a financial institution, is going to send you an e-mail and ask for your account number, username, and password. And that is exactly what the malicious spammers (called phishers) do. If for some reason an institution wants you to verify your information (which is the line most phishers or identity thieves use to get you to send your information), it will instruct you to log into the secure site and verify the information there. When in doubt of the legitimacy of a message, forward the message to the institution that supposedly sent it and ask if it’s legitimate.

FAU's Anti-Spam Solution

FAU has implemented an anti-spam solution called IronPort. By protecting e-mail at the "gateway," or point where it arrives at the FAU servers, messages are checked before they reach your inbox which means that you no longer need to worry about setting up junk mail rules or filters in Outlook or MyFAU.  Rather than relying on a "blacklist" of known spammers or spam keywords, IronPort uses advanced filtering to block unwanted messages. This process stops up to 80% of incoming spam by measuring the behavior and traffic patterns of mail servers to assess its trustworthiness. It can determine the reputation of any URL within a message body so that a more accurate analysis of the messages can be performed.  IronPort also uses context-based scoring to examine the complete context of a message, making it more accurate than traditional spam filtering techniques.