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Issue
45 - September 2005
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Enhanced
Junk Mail Filtering Service
By
Clevin Wong
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Spam,
or junk mail, refers to unsolicited commercial email
(UCE) and unsolicited bulk email (UBE). It is an
annoying problem faced by most of the email users. In order
to provide better spam filtering service, CSC has upgraded
the "spam scanner" software from SpamAssassin
to Sophos Pure Message recently.
Spam
scanner is a piece of software used to evaluate the "spam-level"
of each external email to indicate its likelihood to be a
spam. It does not delete any user email. Instead, it only
adds a special header on each email to indicate its spam-level.
A user can utilize the "spam auto-filtering"
function to filter the junk mail according his/her threshold
on the spam-level.
The new
spam scanner has the following enhancements:
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As
spammers are becoming more sophisticated in mixing their
spam in with regular email, patterns of spam are rapidly
evolving. Hence, the effectiveness of a spam scanner software
is directly affected by the update frequency of the spam
information. One of the major advantages of Pure Message
is that it updates the spam information every hour.
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Pure
Message is a licensed commercial software, its source codes
are confidential. Hence, spammers cannot study its source
codes and devise "work-around mechanisms" to exploit
the program's weaknesses and fool the software.
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Owing
to the collaboration between Sun Microsystems and
Sophos, the Sun's mail server can be integrated with
Pure Message to defend against spam. The integrated solution
enables the mail server to communicate directly with the
spam scanner via a native channel architecture without adding
extra layers of communication overhead thereby optimizing
its performance. Neither does the solution require a third-party
message transfer agent to broker the communication.
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Moreover,
Pure Message has integrated functions of both anti-spamming
and anti-virus on the same software. Thus, effectiveness
and efficiency are enhanced.
For existing
users of the "spam auto-filtering" service, they
can enjoy the advantages provided by the upgraded spam scanner
automatically. If you want to learn more about this service,
please refer to the user guide at http://email.cityu.edu.hk/faq/spamfilter/usrguide.htm
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References
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