New Spam Filter Leads to Instant Communication

By Melody Gustafson
KENT – KSU students in Salem and East Liverpool may have received an e-mail from the office of Information Services regarding improvements in the spam filtering system.

“The current system was unreliable,” said Tom Beitle, executive director of infrastructure and operations for Information Services, “and things were going south very quickly.”

KSU had been considering several different scenarios to remedy the older, “end-of-life” system it had been using. Officials had to decide which vendor and what kind of solution to use, and whether to support that solution on campus or to have an outside company provide the technical support.

After testing Proofpoint, which is both the name of the company and the name of the product, officials decided to keep using it, but they may still change it if this solution proves inadequate.

According to Beitle, when the university implemented the last filter, the amount of sorting only involved approximately 860,000 messages per day. At the beginning of fall semester 2007, the number has grown to a flood of four million messages daily. Only a few months later, the "little black box" now handles about five million messages.

After the messages reach KSU, the filter redirects them to a Proofpoint location where the legitimate mail is separated from the spam. Only the legitimate ones are sent back. Of the five million messages, only 250,000 - 500,000 return, but they return almost instantaneously.

“As we move forward and make decisions we want to do what is reliable, efficient, and cost-effective,” said Beitle, “technology issues are not what you expect them to be.”