Systems Try to Stop Spam Messages Before They Arrive on Campus

Web-based software, often called “cloud computing,” could be a key to reducing the amount of spam hitting campus networks.

Companies are offering new products that can analyze incoming e-mail messages before the messages even arrive on campus. The filtering takes place on servers run by the companies. Stopping malicious e-mail messages off-site can help college networks run more smoothly.

One of the companies is Google, which is pushing its new cloud-based spam filter. Last August Google bought a company called Postini that had developed the new spam-filtering system, which Google is now selling to colleges and companies.

“Cloud computing allows you to have all these threats blocked in the Internet where the junk belongs rather than coming to the network of the university,” said Sundar Raghavan, product marketing manager for Google, in an interview. And that can help campus networks run faster, he argued.

Google’s free e-mail service, which is now used at several colleges, already has spam filtering, but the new Postini service provides a more thorough scan and allows administrators greater control over how strictly messages are filtered, says Mr. Raghavan. Essentially, though, if a college that outsources its e-mail to Google wants the same kind of spam policy controls it had when running its own e-mail systems, it will have to pay for the privilege. Mr. Raghavan said Google is offering colleges an educational discount that makes the price about one-third of what Google charges business customers.

Rutgers University’s athletics department is one of the first colleges to try the service. Steve Comeau, associate director of information technology for the department, said in an interview that the option was attractive because it offloads all the work of spam filtering to Google, rather than requiring his staff members to manage the process. “I don’t want to be an expert at the nuances of filtering out spam,” he said. “I just want something that works.”

One concern some people on the campus had to the approach was privacy: after all, an outside company essentially has access to the e-mail messages before users do. But Mr. Comeau said that he was convinced that Google has proper privacy controls in place.

Washington State University recently started using a similar spam filter by another company, called Proofpoint.

“When we first started using the system, we actually received an increase in the number of calls to the IT department from users who believed the e-mail server was down, because they weren’t receiving any spam,” Tom Ambrosi, senior director of networks and chief information security officer at the university, said in a statement. —Jeffrey R. Young