There are many benefits to an IEEE e-mail alias. An alias immediately indicates an association with the institute, makes it easier for IEEE members and staff to know how to contact one another, and serves as a permanent point of contact, regardless of whether an alias holder changes jobs or Internet service providers. And it can also help eliminate a major headache: spam.

More than 100 000 members have signed on for the IEEE Personal E-mail Alias Service. It provides them their “name@ieee.org” address, which they can then keep as long as they remain members. But few who use the alias take advantage of the companion spam-filtering service, available since 2003. Roughly 80 percent of alias owners have yet to sign up to have the IEEE block or tag unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) that could be spam. When the IEEE adds a tag to the subject line of a message that’s suspected of being junk e-mail, the recipient can either delete the message immediately or route it to a folder for reading at a more convenient time. When a message is blocked, it gets deleted.

The fact that alias holders are ignoring the spam filter doesn’t necessarily mean they are being overwhelmed by spam. Many alias holders rely on spam-filtering technology provided by their ISPs or on software they’ve installed on their own computers, says Gilberto Santiago, manager of IEEE electronic mail and security services, in Piscataway, N.J. “Some members don’t feel they need the IEEE’s software,” Santiago says.

That won’t cause the IEEE to stop offering the spam filter, however. “Having accepted responsibility for receiving and handling the mail, it makes sense to assist in combating all the major problems of e-mail, including spam and viruses,” says Senior Member David Green, who is part of the IEEE’s IT Strategy Committee.

And, adds IEEE Life Fellow Robert Alden, who helped lay the groundwork more than eight years ago for the IEEE e-mail aliases, Web hosting, and mailing lists, “You can’t have too much protection. I have virus protection on my PC. I have it provided by my ISP. And I have it through the IEEE.”

Some alias owners may fear that the filtering will invade their privacy. They are under the mistaken impression that “there is a person reviewing messages for particular content that may be interesting,” says Robert V. Jones, staff director of IEEE IT infrastructure and operations, also in Piscataway.

AUTOMATIC SCAN What they apparently are unaware of, Jones says, is that since the alias service’s inception in 1998, the IT department has scanned incoming messages and attachments for viruses. Infected correspondence is captured and a notice is sent to alert the alias holder that, for example, “Message X with subject line Y has been intercepted and deleted.”

Jones reports that in the first three months of this year, the alias service’s virus scanner detected 1.8 million messages with infected attachments. “Obviously, the virus scanning and spam technology have to scan the contents of a message to determine whether it’s spam, but staff members do not read e-mail, and the IEEE does not store it,” he says.

The alias arrangement is simply a forwarding service. IEEE servers receive the e-mail, process it, and turn it back around for delivery to its destination. “In the process, we help out by scanning it for viruses—and, if you want, also process it for spam detection,” Santiago says. The spam filter, which consists of software installed on the IEEE server that manages the aliases, detects junk e-mail by analyzing its contents.

The IT department faces major challenges in that regard. As the engines that identify spam have become more sophisticated, spammers have in turn become more ingenious. “It’s just like the police using a better speed-detection radar system, and manufacturers developing a better radar detection system,” Jones says. If a certain combination of words begins to set off alarms, Jones notes, spammers will implement techniques such as inserting spaces or punctuation marks to try to fool the software.

One IT department countermeasure, introduced in 2004, makes the IEEE’s domain less attractive to spammers.

“Spam sources typically behave in a particular way—for example, opening an unusual number of connections to gather end user e-mail information (directory harvesting attacks), or to transmit unsolicited commercial e-mail,” Jones says.

Once the IEEE alias server determines that is going on, it slows down connections from the suspected server trying to deliver e-mail to the IEEE servers. That, in turn, slows down the number of spam messages that can be sent in a particular time. Since introducing the technology, the IT department reports it has seen an 11 percent reduction in the volume of e-mail delivered to alias holders (262 million messages in 2005, compared with 294 million in 2004). If anything, as the economy has grown, so should the number of spam messages.

Another challenge is making sure that what is detected is really spam. “What’s spam for me may not be spam for you,” Jones says. “Some people may enjoy receiving messages about mortgages and medical products, so you cannot make a blanket declaration that ‘All this kind of content is always spam.’” Instead, the IEEE has adopted a policy that puts the alias owners in control; they choose whether the system simply tags messages or completely blocks them. They also get to choose just how aggressive the spam-checking technology is [see figure for instructions, taken from the IEEE E-mail Alias page].

Jones notes that the spam filter scores incoming messages based on how often words or phrases typically associated with spam occur. Alias holders who set the filter on Low might not be alerted to the presence of messages even with the highest scores, while those who set the filtering level on High would see tags put on messages with even the lowest scores—if they receive them at all. Users can also create a list of preferred senders (known as a white list) whose messages always get through—unless they contain a virus—and one (called a blacklist) containing addresses whose messages will always be blocked.

Spam is a community problem. There are many challenges, and the Internet community needs to get involved to control it, Santiago says. In many cases, universities have been identified as sources of spam; as a result, e-mail sent from them to the IEEE or to an ISP might be delayed. Spam prevention technology is widely used and on occasion, the flow of e-mail will be impacted. It is something we all must learn to accept, according to Santiago, given that there is no silver bullet to solve the spam problem.

To sign up for spam filtering, enter your IEEE Web account on the IEEE Personal E-mail Alias page (http://www.ieee.org/alias) and click the UCE/Spam Filtering Service link. From there, you can set your spam filtering preferences.