Why am I getting all this SPAM mail?
Email spam and advertisements are becoming more and more of a nuisance to USF email users. Like junk mail and telemarketing, "spam" mail is an annoying reality for e-mail users. As is true with other types of marketing campaigns, companies build mailing lists from a number of sources and mail out thousands of ads each day. These unwanted mailings take valuable time and energy to sort through, making the experience of checking e-mail extremely time-consuming and frustrating. It can also cause you to miss important and legitimate emails. It is hard to avoid every spam message out there, but there are ways to avoid most of it. Once you are on a spammer’s list it is hard to be removed, so it is important to be proactive. Campus Computing cannot change your email address to avoid spam. Please follow the guidelines in this document to safeguard your account.
Keeping Your E-mail Address Secret
Whenever you use your e-mail address publicly, you run the risk that your e-mail address will be harvested. If you put your e-mail address on a web page (any web page), it will almost certainly get harvested. If you post to a newsgroup, it will get harvested. If you post to a mailing list, it might get harvested. (On some mailing lists, it can be harvested if you merely join the mailing list, but this is becoming rare.)
You can simply use an invalid e-mail address (such as any address that does not contain an '@' symbol) when sending messages to public places. Unfortunately, if you do this, most mailing lists won’t let you post (for good reason—your fake address isn’t subscribed), and nobody can reply to you.
To avoid spam in your USF email account, you can create a special address for your public uses, such as a free e-mail site (hotmail, yahoo, etc.). Once it starts getting too much spam, you can disable the account and create a new one. Since you are only using this for discussion groups, you won’t need to tell your anyone else about your new address.
Also, please be as careful with your e-mail address as you would be with your phone number. If you do give your email address to your colleagues, let them know that it is for business correspondence ONLY, and NOT to use it on the web or for forwards. This is another place where you can utilize free email sites like Hotmail or Yahoo. Give your colleagues both email addresses and tell them to forward all the “fun stuff” to your non-USF email address. Sure, forwarded messages and jokes are fun, but they also tie up server space and resources—as well as broadcast your email address to spammers. See below for more reasons not to use your USF email for personal messages.
Spammer Scams
Spammers and spam producing websites will try to trick you and other users into giving them your e-mail address. Any web page that asks you for other people’s e-mail addresses is probably doing so for the purpose of sending unsolicited e-mail. For example, most (if not all) e-mail-based invitation web pages will save the addresses of everyone who has been invited, and then sell those addresses, or access to those addresses, for spamming. You’ll also see “you’ve got a crush” web pages that are doing the same thing. They are collecting addresses for later spamming. So anyone who has your USF email address may be giving it to spammers—thinking they're just letting you know about a “fun” website.
So make sure you read the fine print before ever giving out someone else’s address, and make sure anyone who has your email address does the same. If they use an e-invite service to send you an invitation, you will almost certainly start getting spam.
Spammers will also try to guess probable e-mail addresses. You can’t do anything about the initial guess, but you can make sure that they are unable to confirm their guess. What they do is put images or links into their spam, and if you view the image or click on the link, that will confirm that their guess was correct. (E-invite systems will do the same thing, to verify that the address that your friend gave them was your correct address.)
You should never follow a link from a spam mailing. This includes the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the junk mail. Many times, this link is just a trick to get you to click. Trying to unsubscribe may lead you to a “dead” or “unsubscribe confirmed” webpage, but has actually let the spammer know that you have an active email address. More spam will follow, since your email address will be sold as a “verified address”! A good rule of thumb is that if you do not remember subscribing to it, then you probably won’t be able to unsubscribe.
Online orders are another place where your email address can be harvested. Read online order forms carefully! Make sure to uncheck the box that says “Please send me third-party offers” or something similar. If you check this box, you are effectively giving the company permission to sell your email address to other companies.
Online contests will also often ask for your e-mail address for the purpose of sending you commercial e-mail. Some of these companies will sell your address, others will use it only internally (until they are bought out or go into bankruptcy, or change ownership), but if they ask for your e-mail address, they are almost certainly planning on using it.
Filtering Spam using your Outlook client:
Because of the wide variety of academic departments here at USF, at this time it is impossible for us to stop all spam at the server. If we begin filtering messages at the server-level, it is highly likely that legitimate messages for other departments will get blocked. It is possible for individual users experiencing high volumes of spam to filter them at their computer using Microsoft Outlook. For more information on filtering junk mail, search the Outlook help file for “Filtering junk mail”. Detailed instructions are included in the help file.
For more information or help setting up your junk mail filters, please contact User Support Services (via the Help Desk).