ISU WebMail users who want to refinance home loans, order pharmaceuticals online and enlarge certain things may not applaud recent Academic Information Technologies’ innovations to reduce spam in e-mail boxes.

But for the rest, AIT’s new “greylisting” techniques are most welcome.

Greylisting is a system in which any e-mail from outside of Iowa State’s domain is immediately stopped at the server and sent back to its source.

A normal mail server will attempt to resend the message after a short period of time, and the mail is then allowed through.

But spam-spewing machines are less likely to resend the message.

The results have been dramatic; in the first 24 hours of the system’s implementation, AIT reported, 240,000 pieces of suspected spam were stopped from reaching their destinations in ISU e-mail boxes.

“It’s incredible,” said Dave Popelka, associate director of AIT. “From my own personal experience, instead of receiving 15 to 20 spam e-mails per hour, I’ve been getting one or two per day. And I get maybe six or seven overnight, instead of 100 to 200.”

The reaction from those aware of AIT’s new innovation has been no less positive. The first reaction to the system, Solution Center manager Frank Poduska said, was a celebratory one.

“Someone sent us a letter the day it started,” he said. “It just said ‘Hooray’ with three exclamation points.”

The Greylisting system, Popelka said, was brought before AIT by Kent Ziebell, a systems analyst within the department, after it proved successful for Texas A&M.

But the victory may only be a temporary one, Poduska said. In what he termed the “arms race” between spammers and system administrators, no advancement is likely to be a permanent solution.

“One side gets ahead for a little while, and then the other gets ahead,” Poduska said. “It goes back and forth.”

Still, administrators hope that greylisting will, for some time at least, keep junk mail from filling the inboxes of ISU students, faculty and staff.

“I’ve been praying we get about a year’s reprieve out of this,” Popelka said.

There are some risks with the system, Poduska said. Reports of some older mail servers that were unable to work with the greylisting system have come in, resulting in the addresses being “whitelisted.” But the likelihood of mail from outside sources being lost is fairly low, the ISU officials said.

Spam mail is a significant problem for Iowa State, Poduska said.

According to one estimate, approximately 80 percent of all the e-mail received by the ISU e-mail hub is spam, he said.