Princeton - Weekly Bulletin 05/16/05

Contents

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Editor: Ruth Stevens
Calendar editor: Carolyn Geller
Staff writers: Jennifer Greenstein Altmann, Steven Schultz
Contributing writers: Patricia Allen, Karin Dienst, Eric Quiñones
Photographer: Denise Applewhite, John Jameson
Design: Margaret Westergaard, Laurel Masten Cantor, Mahlon Lovett
Web edition: Mahlon Lovett

By the numbers

New anti-spam service

Princeton NJ -- The Office of Information Technology is launching a new anti-spam service called “Proofpoint” for the University community on June 7 (see story in this issue).

• The University’s system currently processes about 500,000 incoming e-mail messages a day.

• Some 75 percent of those messages are stopped at a firewall based on technical checks; 1 percent are stopped by the firewall because they are viruses or worms; and 24 percent are allowed past the firewall.

• With an average message size of 2 kilobytes, the firewall decreases the amount of data coming in from about 1 million kilobytes per day to 240,000 kilobytes per day.

• Based on data from the 400 people who have tested the new system, Proofpoint is quarantining about 33 percent of the messages it processes. That trend is likely to carry over to the larger University community population, decreasing the amount of data coming in from 240,000 kilobytes per day to 81,000 kilobytes per day. This will be a significant saving, in terms of server space for messages that won’t get to inboxes and messages that won’t have to be backed up, as well as important resources such as the time required for people to handle the messages and monitor the backups.