WebMail spam filter improved

Stricter spam-filtering regulations were put into place Friday to prevent some new types of spamfrom getting into GatorLink e-mailinboxes, said John Bevis, an assistant director at UF Computing and Networking Services. For students flooded with spam in the past few weeks,this may come as a welcome relief. Spam and e-mail scams have become such a problem thatthe FBI put out a press release last week warning the public about certain types of fraudulente-mails. One of the scams mentioned in the press release was the electronic greeting card scam, which, according to the FBI, includes a link in the body of the e-mail that takes the recipient toa Web page designed to deceive. This type of e-mail was specificallytargeted by UF’s new spam-filtering regulations. Bevis said in a phone interview that he has no idea how many e-mails may have already been filtered by the new regulations, but he has stopped receiving the e-mails in his own inbox. He also said the WebMail infrastructure handles about 3 million e-mail transactions a day, 2 million of which are rejected outright on suspicion of being spam. “We block a huge amount of this stuff,” he said. “And yet, it’s still coming through at a level people find unacceptable.” Jordan Wiens, a senior network security engineer at UF, said in a phone interview that people who click the links in the greeting carde-mails are perpetuating the problem. “The people who click on the e-card stuff that’s flooding e-mailright now are actually getting themselves infected, and then their computers are responsible for sending spam,” he said. “The more machines that get infected, the more e-mails get sent, the more people who fall for it,” Wiens said, calling the situation a Catch-22. This cycle continues until people get wise to the scams, he said. Then they start to fade, until spammers figure out a new way to bait unwitting people into theirtraps. Wiens said anti-spam laws are hard to enforce because of the foreign origin of much of the spam. A recent 24-hour survey by Commtouch Software Ltd., for example, found that PDF-spam messages were coming from no fewer than 185 countries. “As long as people keep clicking their ads and keep buying the stuff that they advertise … (spammers) will find a way to exist,” Wiens said.