The program inserts "{SPAM ?}" in the subject line of all emails it rates as likely to be spam. However, no email, regardless of whether it might be spam, is read by a human.
"No human being looks at the content," said Fitz. "We are very careful about making sure that we never look at content in order to really have academic freedom and to let people know that they really can discuss anything they want through these means," he added.
Each email undergoes an automatic scanning process which searches for certain things that are common in spam messages. In particular, the scan checks the origin of the message to see if it comes from a known spamming address. The program also checks for unusual fonts, font sizes and colors. However, spam that receives a lower spam score threshold may be unmarked.
The automatic spam check also has increased the speed of the College's email server. Previously, all email was spread among a number of different computers which checked for viruses and spam. Now, a single process scans for both. "The email machines are freed up to respond to people trying to read their email or send email," Fitz said.
In order for the IT department to prevent spam messages from circumventing the scanning process through the other machines, Fitz also announced that some students and faculty who use Netscape or other IMAP readers to access their email may have to reformat their settings.
"Some people had set up their Netscape clients to basically be talking directly to the email machine that they used to be on and that they thought they were still on, and the spammers were finding out what the real address of the email machine was and going around the spam checker the same way that somebody from off campus would do if they were talking directly to their own email machine," said Fitz.
Although changing the configuration of the email server may have been an inconvenience for some, Fitz said that it was a necessary change. "There was a lot of spam getting through that way," Fitz said. He added that there has been a significant decrease in the amount of spam reaching email inboxes.
Since it is possible that students or faculty might get personal or work related emails in large, bold fonts in bright colors that would lead the message to be tagged as spam, the IT department decided to label messages, rather than deleting them. "Rather than actually deleting anyone's email and later finding out that we had deleted something important, we decided the better thing to do was to mark it all," said Fitz. "People can take whatever action they think is appropriate."
The IT department hopes that the spam-labeling program will be useful for College email users. "There was far more spam than is reasonable to expect," said Fitz. "Some faculty were getting 30, 40, 50 messages a day and some was very offensive to them. It had reached the point where we just had to do something."
"I think it's great the IT department is trying to streamline my email use, making it as pleasurable an experience as possible," said Mihailis Diamantis '04.
Despite assurances from the IT department that the process is completely automatic and no email will be deleted, some students expressed concerns over the new policy.
"I feel uncomfortable with the IT department tampering with my email," said Geoffrey Brounell '04. "I almost deleted an email from a friend that was marked as spam."
According to some, the change went largely unnoticed. "I didn't pay a lot of attention to the original email [from the IT department], but the idea seems pretty harmless," said Graham Leach-Krouse '05.