Lizzie Martinez

Copy editor 

From Feb. 17 to 20, 902,539 e-mails were received on the Linfield server from off-campus sources. More than 78 percent, or 705,068 messages, were quarantined as spam.

Chief Technology Officer Irv Wiswall admits he receives as many as a dozen spam messages daily on his Linfield e-mail account. Even so, he doesn’t see spam as a problem at Linfield.

The school uses the software program PureMessage, produced by Sophos, to protect against spam. PureMessage filters incoming and outgoing e-mail for Linfield accounts. It uses rules to determine if a message is spam, depending on the content, source and words.

To protect against the popular Nigeria scam, where a Nigerian man tries to con recipients into a faulty check deal, PureMessage looks for the word “Nigeria” in e-mails.

PureMessage is updated approximately every hour by SophosLabs to keep it up to date and protect Linfield against the latest technique spammers are using.

Messages identified by spam are quarantined. Students can choose to have PureMessage send one e-mail a day notifying them of all the quarantined messages. This provides a block against falsely identifying any e-mails as spam, known as a false positive.

“Generally, people would rather have a few spam messages than a few false positives,” Wiswall said.

Junior Eric Butler agrees. As the Senator for the Outdoor Club, he has witnessed spam sneaking through the filter and arriving in the club’s inbox. Though it started as messages selling business software, Butler said the e-mails’ content has grown worse. Even so, he agrees with Wiswall that spam is not a problem.

“It’s not that much (of an) inconvenience; to delete it takes two or three seconds,” he said.

Though the amount of spam is increasing, PureMessage continues to filter out the majority of it. Wiswall said about 200 spam messages are quarantined in his e-mail inbox each day.

Wiswall said the more students participate in activities on the Internet, such as buying products, subscribing to lists or joining Facebook, the more their e-mail address is distributed. This increases the chance that spammers will find the address.

Recent trends in spam have included harvesting personal information, Wiswall said. This occurs when spammers visit sites such as www.monster.com where they can find information on an individual. They use this information to tailor a message to the person including information such as name, school and major to better sell them a product.

Older forms of spamming that can be dangerous include phishing, bots and key loggers. Fortunately, PureMessage and Sophos work to keep Linfield protected from all these spamming evils.

“I’m pretty happy,” Butler said. “It seems to catch most of it.”