XplanaZine

The volume of unsolicited bulk email has doubled in the last year. One of the hardest hit groups is higher education due to the relative openness of our networks. We are in the information sharing business so many of the techniques used in corporate environments will not work for us. In corporate networking culture it is often possible to simply block email at the server from regions of the world that tend to be a problem. Likewise, being a business we would not make every email address in our organization available via the web. In higher education we play by very different rules. We cannot just filter out all email traffic from a given region of the world no matter how troublesome the region is. Nor can we refuse access to internal email addresses. We are all about sharing and collaborating with diverse groups around the world. While this is our best asset, it is also our worst security hole.
Companies are popping up all over the place offering services and software designed to rid us of spam. Solutions range from specialized software you run on your personal computer to enterprise solutions designed to rid everyone in an organization of unwanted bulk mail. So what is being done in higher education to combat spam? Fortunately, Georgetown University created a repository of information from different higher education institution about what tools they use in the war on spam. Jerome M Berkman at Berkeley posted a question in October to the SANS University Security mailing list, unisog-at-sans.org, and some other mailing lists to find out what people at other institutions are doing about spam. The Georgetown data coupled with the summary of responses to Berkman’s question show SpamAssasin (open-source) and PureMessage (commercial product) are the most commonly used server-side solutions in higher education at the moment.
If you are looking for a means of fighting spam on an individual level sunspot.net has an article you should read. It says everything I would have on the subject so why reinvent the wheel. What tools and techniques have you used to rid your in box of spam? Click the comments link and tells us about your experiences.