Dental Informatics NewsletterDental Informatics Newsletter
Number 1
October 2004
WHAT IS SPAM?
Spam is unsolicited mail or junk mail sent to large numbers of people, especially when not related to your job; it is an inappropriate attempt to use a mailing list. Unwanted commercial email is reportedly more than 80% of the traffic on hotmail.com. There has been a considerable escalation of spam since 2003. Spammers are increasingly skillful in bypassing filtering techniques.
WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT THE SPAM E-MAIL I RECEIVE?
(1) Don’t automatically “Reply to all”.
(2) Delete It and Don't Reply to It.
The Information Technology User Advocate recommends that you just delete spam mail that you receive and strongly recommends that you do not reply to a spam message—not even to ask to be removed from the mailing list. Spammers tend to treat such replies as confirmation that your e-mail address is a valid one. For more information about dealing with spam e-mail, see the User Advocate's “Can the spam” page: http://www.umich.edu/~itua/email/canthespam/
(3) Use Filters/Rules
Some e-mail programs allow you to set rules or filters that will automatically move messages from certain senders to specified folders or mark them for deletion when you use those programs to open your INBOX. For general information about filtering, see the E-mail filtering Overview (S4300) at http://www.itd.umich.edu/itcsdocs/s4300/.
For mail.umich.edu, see the instructions in “Appendix C: Setting Mail Filters” in “Using mail.umich.edu for E-Mail on the Web (S4297): http://www.itd.umich.edu/itcsdocs/s4297/s4297B.html#appc
For Pine, see the instructions in “How to Filter Your E-mail with Pine (S4310)” : http://www.itd.umich.edu/itcsdocs/s4310/
Eudora includes mail filtering capability. For instructions, look at Eudora's online help, which is available from Eudora's Help menu.
Call the Dental Desktop Support, at 3-3318, if you need help with setting up filters.
There is currently no completely foolproof way for system administrators to configure the campus-wide e-mail system to determine what is spam and what is valid e-mail. ITCS is working on an anti-spam content-filtering solution that will be centralized and easier to configure and support than individual clients. People would continue using the mail programs they've been using and all their spam would be delivered to an imap folder named DSPAM instead of their imap inbox folder. For more information see:
http://www.itd.umich.edu/e-mail/nospamgroup/06-01-04report.html
(4) Forward Problem E-Mails to the IT User Advocate (abuse@umich.edu)
IMPORTANT: To help you, the IT User Advocate needs more than just a forwarded e-mail message. Before forwarding an e-mail, please read the information at: http://www.umich.edu/~itua/email/canthespam/what.html to find out what is required.
(5) Use the ‘bcc’ field, rather than the ‘to’ field, for listing multiple email recipients, thus hiding the list of addresses from the recipients and especially from potential, unintended “e-mail harvesters”.
ALTERNATIVES TO SPAM
If you have something to buy, sell or trade, use “Marketplace – An Exchange Environment for U-M Students, Staff and Faculty” to reach a large number of people: https://marketplace.umich.edu/UofM/WebObjects/Marketplace
To advertise an event, use “UM Events Online Events Calendar”
REFERENCES
http://www.itd.umich.edu/help/faq/email/nospam.html
http://www.umich.edu/~itua/email/canthespam
FEEDBACK
We welcome your suggestions: let us know if you found this newsletter useful, how we can improve it, what topics you would like us to cover in next issues. Please e-mail your suggestions to ruxandra@umich.edu