Spam

College of the Desert uses state of the art spam and virus protection to minimize unwanted email and eliminate email viruses.

 

We check each message for file attachments and viruses using F-Prot Anti-Virus and ClamAV Anti-Virus scanners. We maintain a list of file attachments that will be blocked. The Virus scanners definitions are updated hourly.

 

We check the Real Time Blackhole lists like spamcop and spamhaus to see if the senders IP address is in their database of Spammers. If not, we take apart each message to see of there are any links within the message that have been registered with six different URL Spam Databases. If there are URL links within the message that match one of the six spam databases that we reference, we score the message very high to be flagged as Spam.

 

We then process the message using the SpamAssassin Anti-Spam Engine looking for keywords, phrases, header information, malformed messages, relays, misspelled words, misspelled combination of words and phrases, background of the message, fonts used in the message, etc. The SpamAssassin Engine uses about 1024 rules that focus on the attributes of a Spam message. Each one of these attributes increases a score value. Once we exceed our defined score value, the message is considered Spam.

 

The SpamAssassin Anti-Spam Engine also uses a Baysian Token Analysis filter to further score messages that are not Spam versus messages that are Spam messages. It does a comparison of non-spam messages versus spam messages to help raise or lower the Spam score.