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Stopping spam before it gets to you
by WONG Eik Lin
Spam and email-based threats are increasing at an alarming rate. Not
only does spam attempt to sell you un-licensed software at outraging low
costs, drugs that do wonder and opportunities to strike a huge fortune, it
has also evolved to jam your mailboxes with spyware and phishing baits.
Overcoming any damages will result in overtaxing our administrative resource
and budgets, with existing security systems stretched to the limit.
With such concern, it was timely for Computer Centre to further safeguard
individual staff and students’ IT security, corporate information and
IT infrastructure, by introducing the new Email Reputation Service
(ERS).
ERS, put simply, is to stop spam at source,
even before it starts handshaking with the servers in NUS. Our current
approach of classifying and redirecting spam to everyone's Spam Folder is no
longer efficient enough to eradicate spamming.
Specifically, with ERS, emails are rejected outright for consistent spammers, present and past. For those that are known to have started sending spam, the messages are initially rejected with a warning message to re-try moments later.
Initiating re-tries is a costly methodology since the resources need to be
optimized to distribute the most number of spam in the shortest possible time;
re-trying to send a spam is never an economical option.
However, for legitimate emails, re-tries are automatically done within
minutes and the email gets delivered, requiring no human intervention.
On hindsight, there may be instances where emails from a particular Internet Service Provider
(ISP) are delayed for a substantial period of time for up to a few hours if the ISP did not take quick remediation action to curb spam. For such instances, it is not uncommon for staff and students to experience delays in their emails received.
The Internet is a big eco-system where all Internet Service Providers
inter-depend on each other. It is therefore important that due
diligence is rendered to ensure that timely and reliable services are
available to customers.
For all email delivery feedback, kindly contact ITCare at 6516 2080 or email for assistance.
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