I heard indirectly that virus and spam filtering are coming to mail.msu.edu, and sooner rather than later.   Is this something that was announced at the latest MSUNAG meeting?

Assuming this is true, is there any information on how spam filtering is going to be done?

A few months ago I started doing virus and spam filtering on our own mail server.   (We're giving people the option of giving permission to filter incoming mail or else finding somebody else's mail service to use.)  The virus filtering is going fine.  The spam filtering is going about as well as I expected.

I'm using the blacklist services that are pre-configured by Ipswitch (the maker of our mail system).   That catches a lot of spam, and I haven't had so much as one false positive reported to me.   At first those filters seemed to catch about a third to a half of the spam.   Now it's an ever-smaller fraction.

I might start doing some "statistical filtering."   But I might not do it if mail.msu.edu is going to provide better quality spam filtering than I could ever hope to do myself.    When we decided to implement virus and spam filtering late last summer, we justified the effort in part because it didn't seem like mail.msu.edu would be doing it in the near future.  If this is not true, I may adjust my own activities accordingly.

John Gorentz
W.K. Kellogg Biological Station