After its first month of service, the Lab’s spam-snagging service has more than doubled the amount of unwanted email that is blocked and/or tagged each day. The service, called BrightMail, scans all incoming email for characteristics common to spam and applies a [SUSPECTED SPAM] tag to each piece of offending email before delivering it to the intended recipient.

BrightMail works in conjunction with the Lab’s “spam wall” application, which completely blocks email coming from email addresses submitted by Lab employees. While previously submitted addresses will continue to be blocked, no new ones are being added to the spam wall filter now that BrightMail is up and running.

“Since people still see spam in their inboxes, they may be wondering if BrightMail is effective,” said Mark Rosenberg, head of ITSD’s Computing Infrastructure Technology Group. “But the system is helping employees more easily manage anywhere from 1,000 to 2,500 spam messages each day. Our main goal is not to lose or block any real email, so we tend to err on the side of getting the mail to the intended recipient and letting them make the final determination.”

Here’s look at incoming spam traffic at the Lab.

If you receive a piece of spam and it is NOT tagged [SUSPECTED SPAM], please forward the message – as an attachment – to spam@lbl.gov. The email is then forwarded to BrightMail, where its characteristics are analyzed and a signature file is created and sent to the Lab’s BrightMail server. IMAP email users can easily forward the message as an attachment from their inbox by highlighting the message, right clicking on it, then clicking on Forward as Attachment. Netscape email users can also set up their system to automatically forward all messages as attachments by pulling down the Edit menu, clicking on Preferences, then Messages under the Mail and Newsgroups heading. The top item allows you to select how messages are forwarded – choose As Attachment and click OK.

If the message is already tagged [SUSPECTED SPAM], please do not send it to spam@lbl.gov as the message characteristics are already identified.

On the other hand, if you receive a piece of legitimate email with the [SUSPECTED SPAM] tag, send it to notspam@lbl.gov to help eliminate such “false positives” in the future.

“When we decided to use BrightMail, we told employees it was an industrial-strength tool, but we knew it wasn’t foolproof,” Rosenberg said. “By following a couple of easy procedures, employees can help us make it even more effective as a means of managing spam.”

Read more information about BrightMail.

Read answers to frequently asked questions about BrightMail.