HomeHome Flag of the Danes Flag of the United States of America

State of the Art Email Spam Filtering
Symmantec gets the call from the 'Tute Alumni Association.

May 11, 2009
By MIT Alumni Association

Dear Alum,

In an effort to enhance our Email Forwarding for Life (EFL) service for alumni, which processes about 10 million messages per week, we recently worked with an EFL committee (appointed by the Alumni Association's Board of Directors) to study the range and effectiveness of spam solutions being used on campus. As part of that work, we sent a survey to 3,500 alumni in order to determine how users would react to a possible change in our "spam settings" policy. We discovered, among other things, that alumni were amenable to changes in our current policy as long as the changes allowed users to review messages flagged as spam.

We found we could both enhance the identification of spam and offer alumni the ability to review messages flagged as spam by implementing Brightmail, a product from Symantec Corp., a provider of security storage and systems management products and services. Additionally, we could drastically reduce the frequency of being placed on deny lists by email providers, which affects delivery to all users. At present, the 3,300 EFL accounts (4.85% of all accounts) with spam filtering disabled accounts for over 60% of the spam forwarded through our system, which affects the number of times we are put on such lists. This Symantec product has been used with great success by the Sloan School of Management for the past few years, and is being rolled out to the MIT campus community.

I am writing to let you know we will be migrating spam management to Brightmail for all alumni in the next few weeks.

Features of the service include:

  • A Spam Message Quarantine box where you will be able to review and take action on messages that have been identified as spam.
  • A spam summary email sent to you once a day that includes the From, Subject, and Date/Time of all messages identified as spam during the previous 24 hours.

a. The Digest includes quick links to Release or View an individual message, and the URL for accessing your Quarantine box.
b. You will not receive a summary email if you have no spam for the previous 24-hour period.
c. You may set up a filter locally to send such summaries to your trash or add the summary email From field to your Bad Senders list (deny list) in Brightmail if you do not wish to view such emails.

  • Within your Quarantine Box you may also set preferences for:

a. Good Senders (allow list)
b. Bad Senders (deny list)
c. Language Settings—allows you to receive messages sent in various languages.

The day before your account is migrated we will send you the information you will need to access Brightmail. Your account will be migrated next week.

If you have any questions prior to or after the migration please contact help@alum.mit.edu.

Sincerely,

Joe Recchio
Director of Information Systems & Services,
MIT Alumni Association
   
Montpelier Websites' FAMOUS
Frequently Asked Questions


login


search
September 8, 2010 | 9:24 pm 55 °F
Montpelier, Vermont USA 44.26N 72.58W
G1 Endy Race 2 Lap 825
Last Lap  @robertwagnervt Volunteers called to build enthusiasm for November election, not #corruption #vtgov @BTV_Dems #VT go go go September 01, 2010 10:36:37 pm Driver's Condition: On time for fall
contact about music
Track News
edited by DAN ALLEN
New Host
Next Steps
Rather than relying on email for a task list that is changing all the time, I am keeping the next steps and status on this page.
By Dan Allen

Twitter

Replaces the byte as the smallest useful package of data

    follow

    Music
    Dan's Playlist

    By Various Artists

    Slow Is Fast
    Plugging Into Bedrock
    Even though immediate objectives are in sight, still necessary to delay speed for infrastructure development. In this case, infrastructure is spelled V-T-D-i-g-g-e-r.
    By Dan Allen

    VTDigger Story
    Smart Grid Over Broadband
    Assebling the pieces slowly in the Work Queue go go go

    What is AJAX Programming?
    AJAX is a special program for updating parts of a webpage. The benefit is that tiny parts of a web page can display changes without re-displaying the parts of the page that have not changed. Re-display forces the internet to carry mountains of data it already has delivered. AJAX lets the internet say: "Update this one part of the webpage, and leave everything else still."

    live earth with live webcams

    By Dan Allen

    Ferguson and the Montpelier 650

    Stephen Ferguson pays the freight, but is not allowed to drive. (Indy News Service)
    Stephen Ferguson grew up near the speedway. Even though he practically owns the team, team captain, Jimmy Glass, will not let him strap-on the car for a ride.
    By Tim Twinam, Montpelier Star

    Data Bridging
    data bridging at the Montpelier Worldwide Telecommunications Speedway
    Bridges only go in difficult spots, whether the bridge is for G1 Endy racing or data streams. In this Montpelier Telecommunications Super Speedway photo, data bridging is set in place during a driver rest period (August 2008). In the Boston area, data bridge work like this takes place under lights at night, to avoid disrupting traffic. Montpelier Speedway road crews have the relative luxury of working in the sunlight, kept cool by Green Mountain breezes.

    Moving data from one kind of software or database to another is difficult. Paste this web page, or even just a part of it, into Word, email, Excel, or almost any other program, and most likely what you get will be wild distortions of what you are looking at now.
    By Dan Allen

    Basic Racing Skills
    FTP
    File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is our friend in web racing.
    By Dan Allen

    Vermont Electric Running Super High Speed Broadband
    Over the next three years, Vermont's electric companies, through Velco and Vermont Transco LLC are installing super high bandwidth backbone for public use.

    From the Archive
    Allen's Beacon on Mount Everest Signals OK
    May 8, 2008 - As weather cleared on Mount Everest, a beacon signal from Dan Allen indicates all is well.

    Clear morning on Mount Everest
    By Anthony Vinsensen

    Lose Yourself
    If you had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted, would you capture it?

    By Eminem

    Email Spam Filtering
    Sample solution, from the MIT Alumni Association
    By MIT Alumni Association

    overflow