all State University is now providing spam filtering hosted by Microsoft Corp. for all Ball State e-mail accounts. For students and staff, this means fewer spam and virus-inflicting e-mails in inboxes and more space for legitimate correspondence.
With the new hosted system, mail sent to all @bsu.edu addresses will be automatically routed through a filter to weed out spam and virus messages before they get to Ball State. The old system was installed on campus, which meant everything came to Ball State to be filtered. With the new system, the filtering is done off-site - leaving more bandwidth for legitimate mail.
University Computing Services realized its previous filtering system was inadequate based on the amount of spam that was getting through to students. Now that the new system is in place, Ball State officials have successfully solved a major problem all students had to deal with on a daily basis.
According to university officials, the filtering service has been working quite well so far. Thursday, 2.2 million e-mails were sent to @bsu.edu accounts and were routed through the filter. Of the more than 2 million e-mails, only 100,000 were deemed legitimate and the rest were blocked. Students need not worry about losing legitimate mail, since the system has a high success rate with fewer than one in 250,000 messages incorrectly marked as spam.
For the numerically challenged, this means that 2.1 million spam and virus-infecting messages could have reached students, but instead virtually the only thing that got through was legitimate messages.
Such a massive amount of spam e-mail would have caused quite a few headaches and heavy use of the delete function, to say the least.
Spammers are always finding new ways to get past filters and get messages to people. The more people who see and interact with the messages, the more money the spammers stand to make.
Now, spammers have a reliable filtering system to fight against in their attempts to swindle students. Everyone at Ball State should thank UCS for working with Microsoft Corp. to get the issue of overflowing spam canned.
Read More
Three Air Jam teams take home the win
October 12, 2012Nineteen teams shimmied, shook and flipped for a sold out John R. Emens Auditorium on Thursday night during the 25th annual Air Jam.
Bill Clinton Speaks at North Central High School
October 12, 2012Former President's Speech Could Have Effect on State Senate Race
