Director's Blog
Spam, spam, spam, spam…

We’ve received numerous reports from our customers about an apparent increase in spam in recent weeks.  Indeed, looking at spam statistics shows that spam activity has risen significantly in the past couple of months; see the charts at MessageLabs, which are complete through March.  I’m guessing that April will be even higher.  They list the spam rate as 75.7%; over three-quarters of all the mail sent on the Internet is spam.

Now, our spam filters are generally pretty good about catching spam; probably 80-90% of the total spam volume is caught before users see it.  But spam protection is always an arms race, and right now the spammers have come up with some new techniques which are succeeding at getting around many of the spam filters.  Getting around spam filters is a bounded problem; blocking spam is an unbounded problem.

We have a page with some suggestions on how to deal with spam.  One of those is that you can forward a spam message to spam@berkeley.edu to report it as spam; Calmail will use your message to help improve their spam filters.  (The message has to be forwarded as an attachment).

We’re also in the process of moving all of our mail service over to Calmail.  Calmail allows us to host a mail domain such as LS.berkeley.edu on their own servers.  They’re a much bigger operation, and they have many more resources to put into spam protection.  We’ve moved the math.berkeley.edu domain over, and are initiating projects to migrate the rest of the domains we run on departmental servers.  We expect that migrating to Calmail will reduce everyone’s spam counts, and provide more reliable service as well.  (See my post on high availability).