B u l l e t i n Number 59,February 2006 - Year VI

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N e w s  

Board of INESC Porto with new distribution of responsibilities
Campo Alegre closer to Asprela
INESC Porto in FEUP Open Week
Optoelectronics and Electronics Systems Unit starts project with the European Space Agency
Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit in projects of the Sixth Framework Programme
RTP uses INESC Porto solutions
Manufacturing Systems Engineering Unit faces cutting and bundling problems in important scientific activity
The Power Systems Unit signs a contract for wave energy
DIL member presents Masters Thesis at the Faculty of Economy
The Information Management Service offers in requisitions in bits
CIS fights SPAM invasion
New People
Russian Roulette

O p p o r t u n i t i e s 

Jobs For The Boys And Girls
In this section, the reader may find reference to public announcements made by INESC Porto offering grants, contracts and opportunities of the same kind

See Opinion 

 

N E W S

CIS fights SPAM invasion

In the last weeks, the INESC Porto servers experienced an unusual overload of SPAM mail.

The SPAM contained all kinds of publicity on “wonderful” (miracle might be the best word, actually) products, extraordinary sites and virus, many many virus! The worst part is these messages are addressed to users that no longer belong to INESC Porto or just don t exist, which resulted in the e-mail queues congestion. Thousands of messages were kept on hold for the confirmation of impossibility of delivery.

In practical terms, this congestion brought a considerable delay in the delivery of e-mails that went up to 30 minutes and even some hours depending on the time of day.

It appears the problem was solved with the change in the functional model of the processing of messages addressed to the internal network. In order to avoid this sort of problems in the future, and according to the Communication and Informatics Service’s plans for this year, a new e-mail server will soon be available in order to guarantee redundancy to the current internal and external servers.

From the point of view of the users, no changes will be necessary: they should keep the recommended procedures for the e-mail configuration.

Regardless of the strength and reliability of the e-mail servers, there are good practices recommended in the use of this service to minimize SPAM. In spite of this, INESC Porto is still a target for this kind of messages because the “inescn.pt” and “inescporto.pt” domains are long known. This is what we recommend to the users:

1. Do not answer the SPAM messages asking for the removal of a list. This is the best way to let the spammers know that a given e-mail address is real and receives the trash.

2. Use an e-mail client that enables the dynamic learning, classification and removal of the SPAM messages. Thunderbird is a fine example of that.

3. Avoid posting your e-mail address on web pages or newsletters. If that is necessary, replace “@” with something that renders that address null (for any basic search engine) but intelligible to the person reading it. Use, for example, “_@_” or “at” or “<SP>@<SP>”.

4. Do not subscribe to e-mail lists or insert your address in web pages surveys whenever you are not sure of its future use. Normally, the people in charge of these lists or sites publish a very explicit policy of use, making it possible to exclude the kind of use you do not wish to give your address (although that policy may not be reliable).

5. Avoid unsafe connections to your e-mail server.

If you have any questions regarding the configuration or use of the e-mail, you can contact the CIS.

"Postmaster at INESCPorto . pt".


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