ITS has been upgrading its entire portfolio of servers over the past several months. During November, the College’s SPAM control system, PureMessage, will receive a version and performance upgrade.

One of the main components of PureMessage is an heuristics engine that analyzes every incoming message to assess its likelihood of being SPAM. The engine assigns a score representing this likelihood and, depending on the score, messages are either dropped, quarantined, or delivered normally. The PureMessage quarantine is the component that most users see or use nearly every day; you receive notification that something is held in quarantine for you, along with a hyperlink to the quarantine. As you visit the quarantine Web page, you may then delete the messages or have them delivered normally.

Because spammers are constantly changing the content of their messages, the detection engine needs to be able to learn on the fly about new types of junk mail messages. Enhancements in the detection heuristics help ensure that PureMessage continues to differentiate between mail that should be delivered normally, mail that should be held for personal examination, and mail that should be rejected.

The new version of PureMessage will also streamline the notification process for messages held in quarantine. The url for checking the quarantine will no longer vary from day to day, but will be the same, allowing users to bookmark the page for future reference.

The volume of messages we process every day has also put stress on the system. When we install the new version, it will be on newer, higher performance hardware.