News Release
November 2005
Bethlehem, Pa., October 31, 2005—Moravian College has recently begun
winning the battle against spam e-mail by implementing the filtering services from Tangent.
In addition to reducing the amount of time students and staff must weed out unwanted
messages, the new service’s anti-virus protection properties also prevents viruses
from entering the college network. During a free seven-day trial of Tangent’s services,
a random sample of Moravian e-mail server inboxes showed that an estimated 75-80% of
e-mail was being blocked as spam as well as a significant reduction in e-mail messages
containing viruses.
Moravian has been trying to combat spam for the last two years. It first
built an e-mail proxy that used real-time block lists (RBLs), which allowed the College
to block e-mail addresses of known spammers and computers associated with residential
networks. “The problem with RBLs is that there are too many false positives,” explains
Jim Beers, networking manager and network engineer for Moravian’s Center for Information
Technology, “We were blocking 65% of all inbound messages because they were identified
as spam.” Moravian’s Center for Information Technology (CIT) decided two
e-mail proxies (computers that accept, process, and forward e-mail messages) employing
three levels of anti-spam technology were needed instead of just one. This process of
building the additional e-mail proxy and upgrading the original e-mail proxy was taking
time away from other network tasks, so Moravian began to research other alternatives,
including outsourcing.
Tangent uses Barracuda Networks anti-spam appliances. Barracuda Spam Filtering
requires an e-mail message to pass through 11 layers of technology before reaching a
customer’s inbox. The program looks for and blocks e-mails that are from IP addresses
of known spammers, that contain more than a threshold amount of keywords associated with
spam, that appear in an unrealistic amount of mailboxes, that do not meet the software’s
authenticity checks, that have an address blocked by Moravian College or an individual
user (likewise it allows e-mails from addresses specifically approved), and those that
contain malicious file types. Barracuda Spam Filtering also uses anti-virus protection
to weed out infected e-mails and rate controls to prevent service attacks. It does not
process e-mail sent by Moravian College users.
“In addition to reducing the amount of spam in a user’s
inbox, Tangent’s services warn the user about messages that may have objectionable
content or messages that contain spam characteristics but may not be spam,” Beers
continued. “Tangent’s service is also useful to Moravian network administrators,
who can now focus on other tasks. Because less spam will be entering the Moravian e-mail
proxy, such messages will not take up space on Moravian’s Internet connections,
opening up bandwidth for legitimate uses. Tangent offers a greater level of redundancy
than Moravian could provide on its own. Tangent maintains its own equipment at separate
locations, each with multiple Internet connections. Also, having Tangent maintain the
equipment means that Moravian does not need to perform hardware or software upgrades.”
“Since the service has gone into effect, we have received a small
amount of spam, but not nearly the amount that we received in the past,” acknowledges
Beers, “The goal in e-mail filtering is to cut down on the total amount of spam
that you receive—you can never eliminate it.”
Moravian College is a private, coeducational, selective liberal arts college
located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Tracing its founding to 1742, it is recognized as
America's sixth-oldest college. Visit the web site at www.moravian.edu.
