Some of you may have noticed a recent reduction in the amount of spam you’re getting through your arrl.org e-mail account. This is the result of a solution offered by our corporate ISP, Interbridge Network. They’ve been able to develop a solution that uses open source software for both the operating system and the actual e-mail analysis. The system is run on a computer physically located at Interbridge. E-mail is processed (filtered) there and, if deemed to be valid, passed on to our server here at HQ. We also have the capability to review the messages that have been filtered out. We're doing that initially to tune the filtering rules but this is not something we paln to do going forward.

We began running the software early last week and, at least here at HQ, saw a dramatic reduction in the amount of spam. So much so that some people thought the mail system was malfunctioning!

We are in the process of testing the “rules” of the software to get a proper balance and filter as much spam without having too many false positives. (i.e. or valid messages that get trapped by the filters) We’re to the point whereby the software is wrong in about 0.0625% of the time (5 messages out of 8,000). In any type of spam filtering software there is always the risk of false positives and we are trying to minimize it. Understand, however, that this will never be perfect. There will also be some spam that isn’t trapped. Obviously, we could tighter the filters but the occurrence of false positives would go up at the same time.

In addition, this solution offers another layer of protection for our HQ network as the software also does virus scanning of e-mails as well. I should point out that this doesn’t eliminate the need for proper virus protection software on your personal computer but it does provide more security, nonetheless.

As with any commercial service, this solution doesn’t come for free. However, we have been able to consolidate the network monitoring services we were getting from another vendor with these filtering services with Interbridge as the sole provider and reduce our overall cost for the entire service package by about $600 per month. So in the end, we’ve been able to add services and reduce costs, pretty much a no-brainer.

Before you ask whether or not this solution could be applied to the arrl.net system, this has not been determined. Since we do not own those machines and Nframe (the ISP supporting the arrl.net) offers a completely different spam filtering solution based on commercial software, this may not be a possibility. However, we will approach them about looking at this opportunity as well as investigating other possibilities for arrl.net.

If anyone has any questions, please let me know.

73,
Barry, N1VXY