New spam-detection engine for CERN mailboxes

The flow of spam (unsolicited e-mail) targetting CERN mailboxes is constantly increasing: 96% of the 2.5 million mails received daily at CERN consist in successfully filtered spam, but spammers get smarter and detecting spam is becoming ever more difficult.

In order to address this evolution, a new spam-detection software engine will progressively be deployed starting from 15 April 2008. It will not affect how CERN users currently deal with spam: the spam configuration page, the ‘CERN Spam’ folder and the Outlook ‘report spam’ button will continue to work exactly as before.

Because spam detection is based on probabilities, some legitimate messages can sometimes be incorrectly detected as spam. We invite all users of CERN mailboxes to regularly check their ‘CERN spam’ folder for such messages. To prevent incorrect filtering of legitimate messages, it is possible to set up a whitelist (list of trusted e-mail addresses that bypass the spam filter) and adjust the spam filtering level from the CERN mailbox configuration pages (see links below).

Useful links:

For more information about spam, please visit

http://cern.ch/mail/antispam

To configure the spam filtering level of your CERN mailbox, go to

http://cern.ch/mail

and click ‘spam fight’.

Thank you for your collaboration.

CERN Mail Services


by IT Department