eMail Routing and Spam Scanning Improvements

Description

The SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) farm receives incoming eMail to the University and hosts the current Monash spam scanning service.

The farm is not handling peak loads caused by an increasing number of 'spam floods'. An outage to any of the three machines in the farm is now resulting in email delays that last for up to 12 hours before being cleared. This is starting to have a noticeable impact on University business.

The Monash spam scanning service (hosted on the SMTP farm) is also in need of replacement. The system relies heavily on the continual maintenance of spam detection rules. Due to the large increase in spam traffic and the constantly changing nature of the spam, it is no longer feasible for Monash staff to manually maintain these rules. As a result, the quality of the spam scanning service has degraded over time.

To address these issues, new hardware will be installed to expand the processing capacity of the farm. At the same time, the spam and virus processing service will be replaced with improved software that outsources the ongoing maintenance of spam and virus detection rules.

ITS believes these actions will address the current issues with mail delays and reduce the amount of spam being received by University staff.