Dear Customer, Over the last few weeks a number of our education customers have highlighted to Redstone the fact that they seem to be receiving a greatly increased amount of SPAM email messages, this is understandably causing problems. A little over 2 years ago Redstone were asked by customers to investigate a method of blocking SPAM email messages that ran alongside the Becta accredited lexical content filtering solution to alleviate the problems that were being noticed. Redstone implemented a solution as a service enhancement and for the last 2 years have been constantly monitoring this solution to ensure that not only were the vast majority of SPAM email messages removed prior to delivery to customers but also that there were no instances of 'false positives' where legitimate email was removed in error. In recent weeks, this solution has not been performing as well as it had been, this is primarily down to the release of the Storm Worm trojan, a SPAM botnet of over 2 million infected machines each capable of distributing many millions of SPAM email messages. This trojan has caused global problems for service providers and our customers are able to read more information at; http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201804528 http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/09/14/storm_worm_analysis/ In an attempt to counter this threat, Redstone have implemented a secondary SPAM detection mechanism in the last week and have also taken information from the millions of blocked messages to define new rule sets that will assist us in blocking even more of these unwanted messages. To give some indication of the work that is being carried out, a snapshot taken off messages received by Redstone's education platform on Wednesday 26th September shown that of the 350,000+ messages received only 50,000 were passed by the SPAM filtering for onward lexical content filtering and finally released for onward delivery for customers. This shows that over 85% of SPAM email messages are blocked by Redstone prior to being delivered to our customers. I understand that this offers no comfort to customers who are inundated with unwanted SPAM email messages, however, despite not being able to give any guarantees that Redstone would ever be able to block 100% of SPAM email messages please rest assured that we will continue to invest in and develop our systems continually in an attempt to rid our network of as many of these messages as we possibly can. David Farmer Network Support Manager