What can you do about unwanted email?

What we do

As of November 2010 the college email gateway servers are receiving around 75,000 messages per day addressed to caspercollege.edu users. The anti-spam system has been consistently identifying over 90% of these messages as spam with detection rates as high as 98%. The fact is Casper College is being spammed-to-death every minute of every hour of every day. The spam that gets through is from sources not yet included in the RBL's, cannot be identified as SPAM by SpamAssassin or is from a whitelisted address allowed to bypass spam scanning.

We rarely use keyword filtering because of personal preferences and false positives. False positives (HAM) are innocent emails that get mistakenly identified as spam. For most users, missing legitimate email is an order of magnitude worse than receiving spam. The bigger content filters get the more likely false positives become. Because of this content filtering is left up to the user to implement with client email filters.

What can you do?

• Sharing Your CC Email Address
You must avoid sharing your email address with untrusted people and web sites, especially in places where it will be posted online and harvested by spammers. Do not use your college email with Facebook, mySpace or similar social networking sites or with web forms, newsgroups, guestbooks, surveys, freebie sites and so on, rather use a throw-away email address (or service). To do this, sign up for a Hotmail, Yahoo or similar disposable email address and use it instead of your college email.
• Caution Using Autoreply
A seemingly great feature of email clients is autoreply. While it notifies valid senders that you're out of communication for a while, it is also pay dirt for the few spammers who use their real return address in spam because it validates your email address. If you want avoid spam you should keep your use of autoreply to a minimum or not at all. If you must use Auto-Reply or vacation rules, reply only to internal users.
• Be Careful With HTML Encoded Email
GroupWise will not open html images unless you override it. Many spammers messages come to you in html form and when you open those emails, images may be requested from their server. A spammer may encode your email address into the request and when the image is called from their server it will verify that your email address is a valid one. Your valid email address to them is worth a premium and ripe for selling. To avoid this don't allow GroupWise to display images unless the message is from a trusted source.
• The Unsubscribe Tactic
If you get an email that you didn't sign up for don't try to unsubscribe with the unsubscribe link. This will only verify that they have a valid email address for you.
• Don't Buy
If people didn't buy stuff from spammers, the business of spamming would stop. A 2008 study suggests that spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send. Story at BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/technology/7719281.stm
• Use GroupWise Junk Mail feature to handle legitimate but unwanted email and SPAM
Setup GroupWise Junk Mail to move emails with annoying recurring source addresses to the Junk Mail folder. This generally does not work for most spam.
One use of the junk mail feature that does work for spam is to add an entire spammy domain ie. yahoo.com, to your junk or block list. If you want to receive email from a user or two at yahoo.com then add their email addresses to your trust list so they won't be junked or blocked. Don't forget to check your junk mail folder daily for "ham", email mistaken for spam.
• Use Rules
Setup a keyword rule to delete mail containing offensive or annoying recurring content.
• Time for a new email address?
  If you feel like you're just being spammed to death and you can't tolerance the spam anymore, for a fresh start your CC email address can be changed.

Conclusion