Increase in SPAM on Birmingham BGFL

[ranj]

Hi

 

I am interested in hearing from other schools, in particular Birmingham schools to see whether they have seen an increase in SPAM over the last few weeks/months.

 

I have been getting a lot of SPAM over the last few weeks as well as a significant number of staff in our school.

 

BGFL recently sent an email regarding problems with SPAM.

 

A lot of the SPAM would get blocked and be filtered with the PMM filtering system that BGFL introduced a year or two ago but now it seems to be bypassing that and coming straight through our inboxes. In particular lots of banking ones are coming through most trying to be HSBC or Natwest.

 

Have other schools experienced the same problem?

 

I be interested in hearing how other schools tackle problems with SPAM. We are using Exchange 2007 and know we could look into Forefront but am worried about the extra administration this could potentially cause and potentially the more expensive licensing we would have to consider for our schools agreement as we would need to buy the enterprise desktop CALs...

 

At a recent training session I went to another colleague said he recommended mailmarshall (is quite cheap and works very well in blocking lots of SPAM) but said he becomes a daily chore to ensure nothing legitemate email is being blocked. Apparantly can cause more calls to IT because some emails will get blocked.

 

I am going to have to do something about this as it's getting worse.

 

Any advice would be most appreciated.

 

Thanks

[garethEds]

We don't get much in Swansea - it does come through sometimes because the spammer fakes the mail to look as if it comes from our domain. It then get's through on the safe domain list.

 

Very annoying that!

 

GJE

[Tyiell]

Yeah, we have noticed an increase in the last few months.

 

We also use exchange, but rather than pay out for ForeFront (which I always want to call Frontline for some reason - like its an xbox game or something!!), we have decided to build a Linux spam filter. I'm in the process of setting it up now. It essentially receives the mail for your domain onto Postfix (a mail transfer software like exchange itself) and filters the spam with spamassassin and mailscanner. Once done, it forwards it over to Exchange for delivery.

 

So much for the theory, but we will see if it actually works by half term hopefully