Spam
(Unsolicited Email)
Anyone
who has spent any amount of time online has received
an unsolicited email message. Like junk mail in
your postal mail box, spam has become part of life
on the internet. WITS currently provides some defense
against unsolicited email, and features available
in your mail client can help you filter them out
as well.
WHAT
WE DO
Firstly,
Willamette University subscribes to three email 'blacklists' --
lists of known spammers -- which are used to immediately
block any email coming from known spammers.
Through this method, we currently block a large portion
of incoming email (approximately 90% of attempted e-mail messages
are blocked at this point.)
Next, we use software called SpamAssassin, which uses a complex
pattern matches, rules, and a neural network to
assign a "spam value" to each message. For example, messages in
ALL CAPS or colors will tend to get
scored higher than plain text messages. If the "spam value" is
reasonably high, the software will write the phrase "***SPAM***" into
the subject line, indicating that the anti-spam software considers
it to be SPAM, but that the final decision is left to the e-mail
recipient.
WHAT
YOU CAN DO
The
most effective way to deal with spam email is often
to delete it and move on. Spammers use several techniques
to disguise where the message originates from and
who sent it. This can make it very difficult to
track and stop spammers from sending email in the
future.
Messages
that come from a legitimate business source usually
have information contained in their messages describing
the process for being removed from the list. If
the source is a legitimate, well-known business,
use this information to unsubscribe. But beware,
illegitimate sources may use this unsubscription
information as verification of your email address.
Use caution.
If
you find that you are often receiving similar messages,
you can use an email filter to delete the messages
automatically. Most full-featured email clients
(such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Netscape Mail, and
Microsoft Outlook) provide mail filtering capabilities
with which you can filter spam messages that are
delivered frequently, provided there is some common
piece of information (sender, subject, text) that
gets delivered in the message.
Although
particularly difficult to track and respond to,
WITS can sometimes assist in stopping particular
barrages of spam. If the above techniques do not
help, please send a message to 'postmaster@willamette.edu'
with some information about your problem. Be sure
to forward copies of the email messages (with the
full email headers) with your message. WITS will
then analyze the messages and attempt to put a stop
to them. Keep in mind that there is no automatic
filtering that is done when you do this, each message
must be inspected by WITS to see if it is possible
for us to filter the message without generating
filters that could block wanted email.
