[SPAM:####] Last week, a number of students fell victim to an email scam perpetrated by spammers masquerading as Bank of America officials. Today, IT Services will institute a new filtering technique in an attempt to lower the amount of spam students receive.

According to an informational email sent to students yesterday, IT Services will stop delivering email it marks as [SPAM:####] directly to inboxes. It will instead route these messages to a folder designated for spam. Emails in this folder — which will remain accessible to users — will be automatically deleted after 30 days. Users can choose to deactivate this default setting or institute even stricter blocking controls at http://tools.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/filter-spam.

The changes will affect only users with an @stanford.edu address, and will not affect individuals who forward their Stanford email to another account or email server, such as Gmail.

Last October, IT Services ended the delivery of emails marked as [SPAM:#####] to mailboxes. The number of pound signs reflects the degree of confidence that the message is spam.

“In the fall, IT Services noticed that basically between 60 percent and 70 percent of the mail coming to Stanford was spam,” said Executive Director of IT Services Bill Clebsch. “We instituted a big change at Stanford, and it was part of why things got better — we took all of the mail that was getting tagged at five pound signs, and we blocked it at the perimeter.”

Clebsch said this action significantly reduced the strain on both email users and IT Services, and he expects the new update to have the same effect.

“We [blocked spam] for two reasons: Number one, people were dying of spam; but number two, we were spending most of the day backing up spam,” he said. “By making that change, we really went from 18-hour days to run our back-ups to four or five hours a day. That produced a huge gain for the University and for our clients.”

Clebsch said he was surprised that people had virtually no complaints about the change in the fall.

“None of that spam was retrievable because we never let it come in,” he said. “I had worried we would get a lot of phone calls, and we basically had no complaints at all. It shocked me.”

IT Services Info Systems Project Manager Nancy Ware said in an email to The Daily that she believed the current changes would be effective based on previous successes.

“We believe these changes will be effective in reducing spam delivery to mailboxes,” she said. “We base our confidence on our experiences since October 2006...We expect the additional changes will further reduce the amount of spam delivered to faculty, staff and student email mailbox and improve general email performance.”

However, Clebsch noted that the new filtering techniques will not eliminate more deceptive spam like the Bank of America phishing emails sent last week.

“We continue to encourage that everyone should be wary of responding to requests for personal information from unsolicited sources,” Ware said. “Remember, people and organizations who send spam and/or phish-type messages use whatever means they can to bypass commercially available filters in order to have their messages hit your mailbox. They continually make changes to how they send their messages to avoid capture by these services.”