In an attempt to stem the flow of incoming e-mail spam at Western, the Division of Information Technology has purchased and employed an anti-spam tool called "Barracuda."

This product scans, on average, between 50,000 and 100,000 messages daily, blocking as many as half of those messages due to the fact that they are either a) infected with a virus or b) spam.

In addition, Barracuda tags as spam (by adding "[SPAM]" to the message subject line) and delivers about 1/5 th of the total messages scanned. The remaining messages (those understood to be legitimate email) are delivered unimpeded.