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Spammed Out? What Can You Do?
By Robin Herron
Does it seem like you're getting more and more unwanted e-mails offering you
products or services unrelated to your work or interests? You're not alone. Those
messages are clogging up in-boxes throughout the university and pose the added
threat of carrying viruses. Known as spam, the e-mails are sometimes hard to identify
until you open them.
Tracy Holt, manager of e-mail systems and accounts in Technology Systems,
says George Mason does not sell or distribute e-mail addresses, Holt explains,
but people who send spam e-mails have various methods to get addresses. You can
unwittingly contribute to the problem, too. "If you're a member of a listserv
or post information to bulletin boards, they can get your e-mail address that
way," Holt says.
If you find spam sufficiently annoying, you can take action, but don't try
to unsubscribe from the list, Holt advises. If you do, that lets the sender know
you exist, and your e-mail address may end up on other lists. You can report spamming
to abuse@gmu.edu, and the university's security review panel will contact the
sender's service provider and lodge a complaint. Unfortunately, Holt says, service
providers don't always respond to complaints. It is also difficult to block spam.
"If they're using a big provider like AOL or Hotmail, blocking them would
also block legitimate e-mail coming from that provider. We'd only do that as a
last resort."
Some hope is on the horizon. Holt's department is about to purchase new hardware
that scans e-mail for viruses and eliminates them or returns the e-mail to the
sender before it enters the George Mason system. The hardware also is supposed
to be able to scan for spam, probably by detecting that the same message has been
sent to multiple people in the system. Although that aspect of the hardware has
not yet been tested, "we're hopeful that it can help with spam as well,"
Holt says.
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