Subject: [SUPPORT] Anti-Spam tool test
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 10:37:51 -0500

I'm very happy to announce a test of an anti-spam tool that we have been
playing with in-house for a few months.  It is called Spam Assassin.  In a
nutshell, Spam Assassin will evaluate your incoming mail and notify you if it
is SPAM.  At that point you can decide if you want to read the message or not.

Spam is the number one complaint we recieve at our techdesk.  Speaking from
personal experience, it can completely overwhelm a mailbox making it almost
unusable.

We are testing Spam Assassin to see if it can help make this less of a
problem.  First off, we need to be very clear on what Spam Assassin is:

Spam Assassin is a set of programs that will evaluate your e-mail to see if it
matches the profile of a likely spam message.  If it feels that the message is
SPAM, it will add *****SPAM***** to the subject line to let you know.  From
there you can decide whether to read the message or not.

In testing, Spam Assassin will not catch every single SPAM message.  However,
it will catch many of them.  In house we have found it to be more than 90%
effective.  With some tweaking, we expect it to become more effective.  Please
note, as with any automated tool that tries to evaluate e-mail, there is
potential for it to mistakenly flag a valid message as spam.

It is also impoartant to note that Spam Assassin is an anti-Spam tool, not an
anti-virus tool.  It will not catch virii embedded in an e-mail.  You must
still rely on an anti-virus program to do that.

As I stated in the subject line of this message, we are starting to test Spam
Assassin.  Given that we recieve and deliver over 130,000 e-mail messages
daily, we want to be sure that our mailservers can handle that workload with
the additional demands that Spam Assassin will place on them.  If they can not,
we will slow down our testing until we get our mailservers reconfigured.

During this test period, Spam Assassin will only be enabled on individual
accounts that request it.  This way we can get a better idea how much load it
places on our network.

If you would like to participate in this testing, please respond to this e-mail
indicating so.  You will be sent an e-mail message when Spam Assassin has been
enabled for your account.  You can also call our help desk to get Spam Assassin
turned on for your account, but I would advise against that.  I honestly expect
a huge response to this message and it will help greatly if we can do this via
e-mail as much as possible.

As we go through this testing process I will post updates to let you know how
things are progressing.

As always, plesae let us know any comments, questions or concerns.

--
Benjamin F. Loyall
President
Widomaker COmmunication Services, Inc.