Those who cringe when they see “[SPAM?]” in their ISU Webmail headers can breathe a sigh of relief. As of Monday, the labeling system will be discontinued.

The decision to remove the spam labeling came from an overwhelmingly negative student reaction, said Dorothy Lewis, director of Academic Information Technologies.

“We didn’t expect students to dislike the new system as much as they did,” Lewis said.

A few weeks ago, AIT implemented new software that added the spam subject prefix to all e-mails routed through Webmail that showed characteristics of junk mail. By comparing an e-mail to a set of rules, the system determined the probability that the mail was spam and flagged it accordingly. The higher the probability the message was spam, the more number signs appeared in the subject header.

There were unforeseen problems with the system, said Michael Bowman, assistant director of AIT.

“The product was never intended to identify spam, only to rate the probability that e-mail is spam,” he said. “We can’t fully determine if e-mail is legitimate; the final judge must be the recipient.”

Problems came when the software would label messages from family members and friends as spam.

“Certain e-mails would get labeled as spam when they weren’t, and certain e-mails wouldn’t get labeled when they should,” said Kent Ziebell, AIT system analyst.

The confusion caused by the spam labeling caused some students, such as Erin Parker, junior in biology, to miss important messages.

“I disregarded some really important e-mails because of those stupid spam headers,” Parker said.

The program was originally designed in response to students complaining about the large amounts of spam in their Webmail account.

“We wanted to help students remove spam but we didn’t want to be intrusive,” Lewis said. “Using software that would label each message based on the probability it was junk mail seemed like the solution. Other universities did the same thing and had success.

“We were surprised at the reaction,” she said.

While many students criticized the program, they didn’t realize blocking spam messages isn’t easy, Ziebell said.

“Stopping spam is nearly impossible,” he said. “As the spammers become more and more sophisticated, there’s little we can do but give tools for individual users to block messages, such as our subject header idea.”

Lewis said two million e-mails flow through the Webmail system every week, making spam filtering difficult and personal inspection of every e-mail impossible.

“Some people think the university staff reads and labels e-mails as spam, but we don’t read e-mail, the software does,” she said. “Besides, ethically we wouldn’t do it and it would be impossible. Every person in AIT would have to read 800 e-mails a second.”

A new filter called PerlMX, which will give users the option of spam detection, will replace the header system. In addition, the flag won’t appear on the subject header line, but further down the message.

More information on the new filtering system can be found at www.ait.iastate.edu/spam.