As of Monday, September 21, SLAC will be scanning outgoing e-mail for spam. If a message is found to be spam with a rating of 90 percent or higher, the SLAC sender will be notified immediately (via a bounce message) that the outgoing message was rejected. The bounce message will tell the sender the intended recipients and subject line of the bounced message.

SLAC's Enterprise Applications team is implementing these changes in an effort to prevent SLAC from being a source of a spam outbreak due to stolen account credentials. If credentials are stolen, then the spammers can use our central email servers. SLAC Computer Security has had tools to detect spam-bots (lots of outgoing emails) on individual user computers for some time, but this doesn't help if the spam is coming from SLAC's central e-mail servers.

The filtering will start with a conservative level of 90 percent spam rating but may lower that at some time in the future.

If you have any questions about this change, please send them to mail-admin@slac.stanford.edu.