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ICC Anti-Spam Facility
ICC has deployed an Anti-Spam facility which operates in conjunction with the ICC Internet Email Relay Service.
During the last session of the ICC Management Committee, it was agreed in principle that ICC would implement two anti-spam policies, namely "Blocking Mail" policy and "Forwarding mail to Organization's specific mailbox" policy.
Unlike virus-infected messages which can be detected as infected without any doubt, it is important to note that emails cannot be "marked" as spam with 100% accuracy. Furthermore, what a user may consider a spam message may be considered by another as a valid mail. A mail "marked" as spam is thus merely a suspected spam mail.
Owing to the nature of spam mail and the impossibility of "tagging" a message as spam with 100% certainty, blocking suspected spam mails, which in actual fact would correspond to deleting such messages, does not lend itself as a viable option.
The ICC Anti-Spam facility has been set up to carry out the following checks on all mail received from the Internet:
- Statistical Lookup Service: checks the incoming message signature against an extensive database of suspected spam email signatures.
- Header Analysis: checks the message for forged or suspicious information in the email header, e.g. sender's address, date, delivery information, etc.
When the above checks reveal a potential spam mail, the anti-spam system can apply one of the two following policies:
Policy 1: Add Header
The following record will be added to the header of the suspected spam mail:
"X-ICC-SPAM-FILTER: SUSPECTED SPAM MAIL".
Although this warning will not be visible to the receiver of the mail, mail administrators can detect the warning through scripts or mail agents and decide what further action they wish to take within their own organization (e.g. forward suspicious mail to organization's specific mailbox, delete mail, forward to recipient with explicit warning, forward to recipient's specific "Spam" mailbox, etc.).
Policy 2: Subject Rewrite
An explicit "SUSPECTED SPAM - " warning will be added at the beginning of the subject line of the suspected spam mail.
The "X-ICC-SPAM-FILTER: SUSPECTED SPAM MAIL" record will also be added to the mail header thus allowing mail administrators to take appropriate action if needed.
Email administrators can create, as per their organization's specific needs, an anti-spam agent that examines incoming email and moves suspected spam to a folder name “Spam”. This type of solution is possible under Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and GroupWise email environments.
For its internal use, ICC has activated the "Policy 1", and implemented a Lotus Notes-based anti-spam agent which moves suspected spam messages to user-specific “Spam” folders. Users can open their "Spam" folder, delete part or all of its content, re-file messages that they do not consider as spam, etc.
ICC will discuss with clients other possible policies to be implemented in the future.
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