CIT Installs Anti-Spam Enhancements

Have you been getting less spam recently? You should be getting less junk email since CIT installed an anti-spam service in front of the NIH Central Email Service (CES). The CES staff spent several months evaluating various options and selected IronPort Systems as the best solution for NIH. CIT launched a pilot project in February, and by Apr. 15 had the IronPort solution in production.

The anti-spam service quarantines spam before it reaches the email system, so it never enters email servers or reaches users. This frees up network resources for work related to NIH's mission and saves everyone the time spent coping with spam.

Already spam has been drastically reduced. One NIH webmaster, who was the unfortunate recipient of 30-to-40 spams a day, noticed that the flow had stopped almost immediately. On a recent day, CES blocked more than 600,000 connections from known spammers. The anti-spam service then removed an additional 70,000 (10 percent of incoming emails), as they were positively identified as spam, thus saving NIH staff the time to delete them.

Processing spam can cost an estimated $4 billion a year in lost productivity according to the Yankee Group, a global networking research and consulting firm. For more information on combatting spam, visit http://antispam.nih.gov/instructions.htm.