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UCD student Jen Arthur works on her laptop Sept. 25 outside the Central Classroom building while her friend Wes Reyna watches. While users of Metro’s Internet server, MetroConnect, still receive advertisements that slip by the system’s security, the majority are filtered out, according to Steve Beaty, interim vice president of Information Technology. Beaty says the problem of spam continues because the creators of it can easily profit using low-cost advertising.

IT targets flood of junk mail

Unwanted ads and spam continue system siege, despite concerted effort

By Kate Johnson
spencand@mscd.edu

Behind most User Quarantine releases and unintelligible subject titles appearing in Metro e-mail accounts, an army of schemes and faceless business propositions lie in wait.

“They never die. They keep coming back,” said Metro marketing professor Donald Chang.

He is well aware of the spam students, faculty and administrators receive on a regular basis. Pointing to his inbox, Chang read aloud the subject of an e-mail he took to be legitimate: “From Professor Steven Kenneth Chambers.” It wasn’t until he opened it that he discovered it was another scam.

“If you have time on your hands, you can afford to send out mass emails,” Chang said.

“It’s very difficult to pinpoint what person is responsible for all that spam,” he added.

On any given day Metro receives around 176,000 e-mails. From those, approximately 140,000 pieces of spam are filtered out. About 57,000 are immediately identified as spam, while the remainders are “quarantined.” The other 36,000 e-mails pass through and are considered legitimate.

“We’ve maintained the software as new versions become available, and there have been usability improvements in the newer versions,” said Steve Beaty, interim vice president of Metro’s Information Technology.

He said it’s difficult to eradicate spam because spammers are skillful at what they do and continue to use a wide variety of techniques to get their e-mails through.

“Their business model is such that they need a very few number of responses to their spam in order to make a profit, and they send an incredible amount of what is essentially free advertising,” Beaty said in an e-mail.

Improvement costs to Metro’s computing system are shared between the students and the college. Students pay for about 30 percent of the cost of network upgrades and around 50 percent of server upgrades. In addition, one third of the roughly 660 computers in the student labs are upgraded each year, including upgrades to almost 200 software packages. The computers and software in the open student labs are funded entirely through student fees.

“We are always looking at ways to improve the user experience and are currently investigating several possible directions to go,” Beaty said. “As always, we need to include the campus community in whatever direction we go, and we need the resources to implement any initiative.”

While students at Metro are aware of the spam, for two it isn’t a major concern.

“I just delete it. I don’t even look at it,” Metro junior Zach Roberts said.

He said that while he does get spam occasionally, he doesn’t think it’s a big enough issue to warrant increasing student fees for increased security.

“I think they (IT) do pretty good,” Roberts said. “No complaints here.” Metro senior Mike Dawson said he gets about three spam emails a week – a lower amount than he’s received in the past.

“I’m not getting too much at all,” he said. “They’ve (IT) been increasing their productivity because the numbers are going down.”

“I think they’re doing pretty good considering how many (e-mails) are out there trying to get through the filters and everything,” he added.

MetroConnect first went online in 2003, at which time administrative and academic electronic mail were merged and integrated into the Portal system. Beaty said Metro’s email system was conceived in a time when there were fewer users in the network, and using it for commercial purposes was illegal.

“Both of these situations have changed and spam is one consequence of this,” he said. “This of course does not mean that we throw up our hands and give up, only that we have a difficult problem to address and that the problem isn’t likely to go away any time soon.

” Beaty said there is no perfect system. Despite this, IT continues to manage 45,000 active e-mail accounts that use close to three terabytes, or more than 3,000 gigabytes, of disk space.

“I believe we are doing a good job,” he said. “I believe we are always looking at improving the job we do in order to serve the entire campus community.”