Spam on Campus
For Friday’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Vincent Kiernan reports on whether open-source software can effectively solve the problems of unsoliticited e-mail at colleges and universities. Focusing on SpamAssassin, Kiernan discusses why institutions turn toward open-source solutions and what some of the commercial competitors are. The statistics about spam on college campus show how overwhelming the problem is.
I personally do not think Kiernan adequately addresses the disadvantages of using spam filters. By not mentioning some of the problems, his article almost implies they’re an absolute soltuion that will eliminate the spam problem without any negative effects. Three e-mail systems I use incorrectly label and/or filter e-mail messages. I disabled the spam filter on one account because it was eating so many legitimate messages. On another account, legitimate messages are constantly labeled spam and there isn’t a way for me to fine tune the filter because it’s an institutional solution. I ignore whatever label the spam filter puts on the e-mails because I can’t trust it. I have a negative perception about spam filters because of these problems.
