Several weeks after the start of the fall semester, a new feature of Penn State's Webmail may be causing problems for some students and faculty.

A new spam filter applied to Webmail by Information Technology Service (ITS) that sorts e-mail messages into either the inbox folder or a junk e-mail folder has had some mixed results.

Communications lecturer Russell Eshleman said he experienced a problem with the new system regarding assignments.

"What happened was my Communications 460 students cover [State College] Borough Council meetings and the idea was they would e-mail the story before midnight," he said. "I have two classes, there should have been 38 or 40 [stories], there were about half [that number]."

Eshleman said he checked the junk mail folder and found the missing e-mails after realizing something was wrong.

ITS marketing and communications director Robin Anderson said in an e-mail message that ITS spam filtering uses SpamAssassin, a system that identifies spam signatures.

"All six of Penn State incoming mail servers look for telltale spam signatures and mark a piece of e-mail as spam, if it meets a known signature," she wrote.

Kevin Morooney, senior academic services and emerging technologies director, said the filtering system is based on complex mathematical formulas. He said the filter then evaluates e-mail and assigns it a score based on the likelihood of whether it is spam or not. Morooney also said the system has been "very effective" in blocking hundreds of thousands of spam messages.

"Our statistics have shown that quantitatively our accuracy is at least 95 percent or above," he said.

Paul Burtis (junior-civil engineering) said he encountered a problem with receiving e-mail messages related to the College of Engineering.

"Anything regarding internships goes in there and I'm looking for an internship, so if I didn't find that I'd be in trouble," he said.

Morooney said spam filtering could be turned off in the current version, and said that in the future, the program will be more detailed and allow users greater flexibility.

"Future versions of Webmail will allow users to set different threshold settings," Morooney said.