Is the SPAM filter down?

Noelia_Borcherding

Hello,

Is the SPAM filter down or has there been an update recently that would have affected it? We have had nothing in our SPAM filter the last several days.

Thanks,

Noelia

Jane Linder

Hi Noelia,

Thanks for letting us know of this. The spam filter has not been down to my knowledge, but we'll double-check to make sure. I asked the support team to open this as an issue for you so that we can communicate that way.

Jane Linder

Hi Noelia.

We found the problem--the spam filter was running, but the prediction service that applies a spam score wasn't working.

I just posted the notice below to the system alerts forum, and the support team is reaching out to college A&R staff too. Thank you for letting us know. We know now that we need to monitor the prediction service.

Alert! Spam Filter Prediction Service Error

An error discovered in the CCCApply standard application spam prediction service has been fixed. This issue began on Friday, August 27th, at approximately 5 pm, and continued until today, Tuesday, August 31st, at approximately 11 am.

College admissions staff must carefully evaluate all student applications received from August 27th to early August 31st. Every student application submitted during this time was given a null spam score and subsequently marked as “not fraud.” 

Given the level of fraudulent activity over the past several weeks, it is highly likely that a high number of fraudulent applications have been delivered to colleges. In the normal course of events, approximately 98% of these would have been caught by the spam filter.

In addition to fixing this error, additional monitoring and alerts are under development to ensure that, in the future, spam filter issues will be quickly identified, and student applications queued until they can be successfully evaluated for fraud.