Systems Administrator
School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS)

MailScanner mastermind, Julian Field must be one of the few people on the planet who enjoys getting out of bed to come to work on a wintry Monday morning. He has been working for the University of Southampton for just over 10 years now and still loves his job and looks forward to what each new day brings.

Julian is a self-taught computer programmer, who in 2000, launched MailScanner, an e-mail security and anti-spam system which now protects approximately 30,000 sites around the world every month.

‘I am very proud of the fact that MailScanner has made such a dent in the industry,’ he said. ‘People are now also installing other products on the back of it.’

When Julian left school, he embarked on a MEng in Information Engineering at the University, followed by a PhD when he researched how people’s lips move when they talk which he felt would be useful for speech modelling.

During his PhD, he set up ECS’ computing help desk to serve staff and students and where he began working full-time in 1994 and was promoted to manager in 1996.

In his early days in this role, he was essentially manning a help desk, but the job has developed since and he now looks after systems for all ECS’ undergraduates and for all the staff, does all the purchasing of equipment and systems and has three people working for him.

Although his position was not initially a research one, the staggering cost of getting ECS’ systems covered by anti-virus software led him to develop his own. ‘Some companies were quoting me £70,000 for ECS and that was back in 2000,’ he said. ‘It was then that I realised that if these commercial companies could come up with solutions that worked, then, so could I.’

He started to research the various anti-virus software on the market and he began to think about more efficient, cheaper ways of developing this type of software. The end result was MailScanner in 2000, to which he has added a number of new features, including one which could put an end to ‘phishing’ frauds which he added last year.
The term 'phishing' describes the act of sending an email to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft.
Julian's new device searches for web links in email messages and compares the address provided with the actual organisation's address. If the two do not match, MailScanner places a large red message in the email by the link, alerting users to the warning and flagging the real location of the website as well as the bogus version.
Julian comments: 'These attacks are proving highly effective at stealing people's credit card numbers, PIN numbers and just about any other confidential personal information the thieves want. The copy of the bank's website is an extremely good imitation and quite good enough to fool 99.9 per cent of people into thinking that it is the real thing. Our device, the first of its kind, will alert people and hopefully stamp out this crime. It needs no frequent updates and will identify these attacks before they hit anyone's mailbox.'

Now, five years later, MailScanner has been developed as far as it can go and has become the world’s most widely used anti-spam security system.

He said: ‘MailScanner has matured now and the rate at which I add new features is very low. It is now at the point where it does what 99% of people want it to do.’

Julian is on the look out for another research project, but in the meantime is enjoying the variety of his daily activities. He does however, feel very strongly about the amount of marketing and spin in the computing industry, so maybe he will set out to change that. So, watch this space …