E-mail is considered an official tool of communication at NAU for its speed and efficiency. However, the increase of e-mail spam over the past year has made simple communication a difficult task, with some employees reporting hundreds of spam e-mails a day.<\/p>\n
“My personal worst was 250 e-mails a day, and that was a few months ago,” said\u00a0Sean Evans<\/strong>, who has been a reference librarian at Cline Library for 25 years.<\/p>\n Previously, all spam filtering was operated on the “jan” and “dana” servers, but the two servers were not sufficient.<\/p>\n Technology engineers at NAU’s Information Technology services addressed the issue by creating a new “cluster” of computers run by a sophisticated program called SpamAssassin. The cluster now filters close to 500,000 e-mails a day.<\/p>\n “This last fall we did quite a bit of work,” said\u00a0Doug Pace<\/strong>, senior software systems engineer at ITS. “We moved where the spam filter happens to a cluster, so there are four machines dedicated to spam filtering on campus.”<\/p>\n SpamAssassin makes spam filtering easy for the technology engineers at NAU. The program is updated regularly to filter out even the most recent spam e-mails.<\/p>\n Employees may already notice a difference in the amount of junk e-mail they receive since SpamAssassin was implemented earlier this year.<\/p>\n “I’ve gone from probably 40 or 50 e-mails a day to about 10 to 12 that are a lot more appropriate,” Evans said. “I’ve noticed a big change.”<\/p>\n For information, call the ITS Solution Center: (928) 523-1511<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"