Spam/Junk E-Mail Information

Spammers can find your address any number of places. Some have automatic programs that crawl through web pages, looking for e-mail addresses. Some viruses harvest addresses saved on people's hard drives. Your address is distributed every time one of your correspondents forwards your message to someone else. Some e-mail lists sell your address to other interested parties.

The college's e-mail directory is NOT accessible online to anyone who does not already have a college e-mail account. Computing Services does not sell your college e-mail address.

What is the college doing to stop spam from getting to me? What are the problems encountered when trying to deal with spam?
As of February, 2006, the college is using the CanIt anti-spam tool. If you have questions, especially if you believe messages are being incorrectly blocked, please contact the Computing Services Helpdesk at x6402. We can work with you to manage your anti-spam settings.

Please understand that no anti-spam tool, filter or blacklist is perfect. With any anti-spam system, some legitimate messages may be blocked, and some spam messages will still make it through the system. We try to minimize these instances, but cannot prevent them all.

As a part of this anti-spam tool, the college filters all incoming mail through a few 3rd party blacklists. We do not accept e-mail from addresses these blacklists have identified as sending spam. The college does not have any influence over the specific addresses that are or are not included on these blacklists.

An address can only be added to a blacklist after it has been identified as sending spam. Also, spammers rarely use the same address to send out their messages. Once the spammer changes their address, their new messages will not be caught by the old filter or blacklist entry.

Spammers often try to obscure the true origin of their messages. Messages that appear to originate from a legitimate domain often come from elsewhere. Spammers also use legitimate domains or ISPs to send out their messages. If we block the domains from which a lot of spam originates, like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, earthlink.net, etc., many more legitimate messages will also be blocked.

Content filtering is even more problematic. Any content the college might choose to filter would invariably result in "false positives" or legitimate mail being blocked. For example, if we filtered out all mail with the word "sex," no one could get mail from the Director of Human Resources, Susan Sexton. There are also issues surrounding content filtering and academic freedom.

What can I do?
If you get spam, delete it. Do NOT reply to the sender. Do NOT click the "unsubscribe" link. These actions only confirm that yours is a valid e-mail address and you are likely to get much MORE spam in the future, not less.

NEVER disclose ANY personal information without verifying the validity of the request. Some spammers try to gather information like social security, credit card and bank account numbers by sending messages that appear to be from banks and other legitimate organizations. This is called "phishing." Most companies do NOT interact with customers in this way. If you receive a message requesting personal information, go to the organization's website or contact the company to verify their request. Do NOT click any links containted in the message itself. Many legitimate organizations will have links on their websites, telling you what to do if you recieve a phishing attempt that appears to come from their organization.

I think the anti-spam tool is blocking a real message. How can I check the messages being tagged as spam?
Please contact the Computing Services Helpdesk at x6402. We can set you up with an account so you can check and manage all your own anti-spam settings. With this account, you can look at the messages caught as spam, release any "good" messages, adjust the level of anti-spam scanning, write your own anti-spam rules, report spam that wasn't caught, and even set up an automatic notification which summarizes the messages tagged as spam to your address. Currently, this feature is only available from campus computers.

The following website by Federal Trade Commission has more information about spam.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/spam/index.html