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Fuzzy email policy change
ITS previously supported "fuzzy email" addresses, this allowed email that was slightly mis-addressed to still be delivered. ITS no longer allows guessed email addresses to be delivered. For example, if you knew someone at Yale named Bob Jones, you could send email to bob.jones@yale.edu and it would likely reach him, even though his official email address would be robert.jones@yale.edu, using the official Yale email addressing convention of firstname.lastname@yale.edu.
As spam developed over the last several years, this fuzzy email matching resulted in the delivery of mis-addressed spam. Now that spam greatly exceeds legitimate email, it made sense to remove this feature.
Affect on the email statistics page
The sharp drop in total messages in July 2006, and the associated drop in spam messages are directly related to this policy change. Now, when a message comes in, it is first tested for validity. If it isn’t a valid Yale address, we don’t process it and it therefore no longer appears in the email statistics as a message or as spam. The drop in numbers is a result of ignoring the fake messages directed at the Yale email domain.
