Control of E-mail Spamming on HKUSUA/HKUSUB systems

E-mail spamming is the sending of many copies of the same message to the Internet and forcing the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it.  E-mail spamming is primarily transmitted through mailing lists of e-mail addresses.  Advertisers amass lists of e-mail addresses and then send their business proposition directly to individuals. Various methods exist for collecting addresses. Advertisers routinely collect addresses from listserv postings, and subscription lists for newsgroups. Web-site guest books are also a popular source.

E-mail spamming is becoming a serious problem because:

• It infringes on our individual freedom - we keep on receiving unsolicited mail.
• Too many mails soon fill up our mailboxes resulting in our mail quota limit being exceeded and not able to receive new mails.
• Spamming creates a load on the network traffic, wasting our network resources or even causing a jam in our e-mail relay.

Although there is no way to eradicate e-mail spamming completely, at the moment we have installed two software packages on our unix systems to tackle the problem.

1:  SPAMCONTROL is a software package that has been installed on the hkusua and hkusub cluster to reduce the number of junk e-mail. SPAMCONTROL detects junk e-mail by volume. Once the spamming has reached a pre-configured level, it will block the whole spamming site completely.

2:  Any site black-listed in the Mail Abuse Protection System's Realtime Blackhole list will be blocked access to the hkusua/hkusub mail servers.

If you have further questions about email spamming, please contact the undersigned.

T.Y. Kan
Tel: 2859 7979
e-mail: kty@cc.hku.hk