Virus Blocking and Spam Filtering

Virus Blocking and Spam Filtering

Viruses and Spam are two problems facing email users today. On the Camden campus, Camden Computing Services takes proactive measures to help fight against both viruses that are carried by email and also spam. We refer to this as Virus Blocking and Spam Filtering.

Virus Blocking:

Currently our email servers are configured to block all incoming viruses that are attached to email, using a tool from clamAV that identifies viruses. Any email laden with a virus is rejected and thrown away and is not passed on to our user community. We also keep our virus blocking software and signature files up to date. Currently we block anywhere from 20,000 to 60,000 virus monthly on our email servers.

There are a number of attachment types which rarely have legitimate reason for being sent through email. These attachment types are also known to be commonly used for spreading viruses. To prevent this spreading, our email server will discard messages with the following types of attachments:

ade adp app bas bat chm cmd com cpl crt emf exe fxp hlp hta inf ins isp js jse lnk mda mde mdw mdt mdz msc msi msp mst ops pcd pif prg reg scr sct shb shs vb vbe vbs wri wsc wsf wsh

Attachments of other types such as doc, txt, etc. will still be able to be sent and received. This list may change in response to any new viral threat. Email that contains a virus or one of our blocked attachment types will be dropped without notification of either the sender or receipient. Message size, including attachments, is limitted to 100MB. Larger messages will not be allowed to be sent or received through our servers.

Finally we still recommend that people not open attachments from strangers, nor from people they even know if the attachment is not expected. Its better to be safe. Be very careful opening attachments.

Camden Computing Services also provides for free for all of our users, the ability to get Trend Micro anti-virus software to install on their systems at work and even at home. This is available to our faculty, staff and students. This acts as a second line of defense against viruses of all sorts and is highly recommended.Camden Computing Services purchased a site license for this software for university wide use. This software can be found at: http://software.rutgers.edu

Spam Filtering:

Spam (unwanted junk email) is a problem people face all around the world.

At Camden Computing Services, our email servers are filtering out spam. Spam is alot harder to stop then viruses and there are many different ways to attempt to filter spam. There is currently no 100% accurate method to block all spam, the technology for this doesn't yet exist. Currently we block spam using a tool called Spamassassin. This tool analyzes all incoming email and by comparing it with signiatures of typical spam messages assigns a probability to the message that it is or is not spam. Once a certain theshold is exceeded, actions can be taken such as moving the spam to a seperate mail folder, tagging the subject line, or deleting it. This service is not enabled by default, but can be turned on from the web page mentioned below.

Using Spamassassin we expect the amount of spam filtered to be as high as 80 or 90%, but one must realize that current technologies will not block 100% of all spam.

For more detailed information, please visit: http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/HELP/Documentation/Unix/Spam-filtering.php

Conclusion:

Keep in mind that the above virus blocking and spam filtering benefits are only available if you are using Camden Computing Services email servers to read email (camden.rutgers.edu, clam or crab). If you read email from other email servers, you may or may not be protected as described above. We also take many other steps to improve our email service to our user community, including large disk space quotas for everyone (over 250 meg for students, staff and faculty...lots of room for new and old email), support for most mail readers, webmail, and secure transfer of email using encryption.

In the near future, we will make our virus blocking and spam filtering statistics available on the web for everyone to review on our web announce page. And as we enable other methods to improve virus blocking and spam filtering we will announce them on our web announce page also. This page can be found at: http://computing.camden.rutgers.edu/Announce/

As you can see, Camden Computing Services takes an active role in dealing with email viruses and spam on our email servers. We are dedicated to making our email service a beneficial, powerful and speedy tool for our campus community. If you have any questions on this topic, please feel free to send email to help@camden.rutgers.edu. Further information on spam and email viruses can be found at:
http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/HELP/email.php
http://www.camden.rutgers.edu/HELP/General/security.php