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The UPC-Barcelona Tech is the first university in Spain to receive the ISO 20000 quality certification granted by AENOR for e-learning or virtual learning and email services.
Email and spam: to be or not to be
The great majority of the email messages reaching the UPC are unsolicited, namely 90% of them. UPCnet, the UPC’s ICT services company, analyzes this mail and rejects over ten incoming spam messages per second, thereby contributing to the university community’s security.
15/01/2010
The amount of junk mail attempting to reach our inboxes is increasing on a daily basis. Over 40 million messages reach the University per month, of which only four million are legitimate mail, the remainder being junk mail, with or without viruses. For Joan Calatayud, director of the UPCnet’s ICT Services Department, the worst problem affecting email is precisely unsolicited bulk mail, i.e. the infamous junk mail or spam.
In order to maintain security and quality on the UPC network, UPCnet operates an email routing service using a relay system. Relays serve as an intermediate layer between the UPC-Barcelona Tech and the World Wide Web that connects the local email systems with the rest of Internet. The service is subdivided into two independent elements: the internal and external relays. The internal relays receive messages generated by UPC users and systems and distribute them to their respective addressees; while the external ones manage the incoming messages, receiving messages arriving via Internet and addressed to University users. This is where the security measures are applied.
The external relays thus act as firewalls, filtering out undesired mail and safety threats. The advantage of these email relay tools—equipped with antivirus measures for total security—is that there is only a single point of access to the email network, allowing security efforts to be focused at that point.
To minimize the impact of junk mail and viruses on the network as much as possible, blacklists are used that are jointly administered by the entire Internet community. These lists indicate spam servers (computers solely dedicated to creating junk mail) and their mail is not accepted. The blacklists are complemented by a system called greylisting, whereby a “greylist” is created that serves to detect spammers not yet on a blacklist.
Greylisting requests a message to be resent by an unknown email sender when it is received the first time. “This technique prevents unsolicited bulk email from arriving, since servers dedicated to spam do not deal with error and resend messages received from their addressee servers, whereas the ‘good’ servers retry sending the messages”, explains Joan Calatayud.
Finally, one of the great local successes is the @upc.edu system, which uses syntactic filters to detect whether a message is junk mail by analyzing its content patterns.
The UNE-ISO 20000—accredited by the Entitad Nacional de Acreditación (National Accreditation Agency, ENAC, Madrid)—is the leading international standard for organizations that manage or provide ICT services. It certifies products in 22 different sectors. The aim of these certifications, issued by AENOR, is to help improve the quality and competitiveness of companies and their products and services.
The e-learning service offered by the UPC-Barcelona Tech to the university community has also been granted ISO 20000 quality certification. UPCnet is in charge of ensuring that the teaching support platform Atenea is operating properly. This virtual environment connects a total of over 35,000 users, providing access to participative spaces, digital documents and educational material for self-learning and evaluation for some 15,000 different users every day.
PHOTO UPCnet uses lists that record spamming servers in order to block the email generated by these computers.
In order to maintain security and quality on the UPC network, UPCnet operates an email routing service using a relay system. Relays serve as an intermediate layer between the UPC-Barcelona Tech and the World Wide Web that connects the local email systems with the rest of Internet. The service is subdivided into two independent elements: the internal and external relays. The internal relays receive messages generated by UPC users and systems and distribute them to their respective addressees; while the external ones manage the incoming messages, receiving messages arriving via Internet and addressed to University users. This is where the security measures are applied.
“The worst problem affecting email is
junk mail”
junk mail”
The external relays thus act as firewalls, filtering out undesired mail and safety threats. The advantage of these email relay tools—equipped with antivirus measures for total security—is that there is only a single point of access to the email network, allowing security efforts to be focused at that point.
To minimize the impact of junk mail and viruses on the network as much as possible, blacklists are used that are jointly administered by the entire Internet community. These lists indicate spam servers (computers solely dedicated to creating junk mail) and their mail is not accepted. The blacklists are complemented by a system called greylisting, whereby a “greylist” is created that serves to detect spammers not yet on a blacklist.
Greylisting requests a message to be resent by an unknown email sender when it is received the first time. “This technique prevents unsolicited bulk email from arriving, since servers dedicated to spam do not deal with error and resend messages received from their addressee servers, whereas the ‘good’ servers retry sending the messages”, explains Joan Calatayud.
Finally, one of the great local successes is the @upc.edu system, which uses syntactic filters to detect whether a message is junk mail by analyzing its content patterns.
ISO 20000 Certification
The UNE-ISO 20000—accredited by the Entitad Nacional de Acreditación (National Accreditation Agency, ENAC, Madrid)—is the leading international standard for organizations that manage or provide ICT services. It certifies products in 22 different sectors. The aim of these certifications, issued by AENOR, is to help improve the quality and competitiveness of companies and their products and services.
The e-learning service offered by the UPC-Barcelona Tech to the university community has also been granted ISO 20000 quality certification. UPCnet is in charge of ensuring that the teaching support platform Atenea is operating properly. This virtual environment connects a total of over 35,000 users, providing access to participative spaces, digital documents and educational material for self-learning and evaluation for some 15,000 different users every day.
PHOTO UPCnet uses lists that record spamming servers in order to block the email generated by these computers.
Message interference
The term spam originally referred to the brand of canned luncheon meat that British and Soviet soldiers ate during World War II. Later, the comic group Monty Python randomly used this word in one of their advertisements, though it had nothing to do with the ad’s content, such that it was generally considered to interfere with the message. Hence, when email emerged, junk mail or unsolicited mail was called spam.
The term spam originally referred to the brand of canned luncheon meat that British and Soviet soldiers ate during World War II. Later, the comic group Monty Python randomly used this word in one of their advertisements, though it had nothing to do with the ad’s content, such that it was generally considered to interfere with the message. Hence, when email emerged, junk mail or unsolicited mail was called spam.
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