NACS has been receiving an increasing number of complaints about unwelcome, unsolicited e-mail. These messages sometimes advertise products, services, or web sites, and other times they are fraudulent attempts to gain information to use against campus personnel and computers.
This “Unsolicited Commercial E-mail” (UCE), also called “spam” (note the lower case — “SPAM” is a trademark of Hormel) has risen in frequency, breadth of distribution, and offensiveness of content. But there is such a diversity of mail, and a diversity of reaction to a particular message, that there is no simple solution for protecting faculty, staff, and students from this unwelcome intrusion.
NACS has long been identifying Internet hosts which seem to be associated with a large volume of spam, and rejecting e-mail from them. While this greatly reduced the amount of annoying e-mail the campus received in the past, it no longer has a significant effect. Something more is called for.
NACS is evaluating a number of products that promise to help the situation. Programs like SpamAssassin can be installed on mail servers or individual computers, and told what kind of mail is not welcome. If you would like to participate in evaluation of anti-spam programs, please contact NACS.
Here are some helpful URLs on the subject.
spam in General:
http://spam.abuse.net/
http://www.cauce.org/
Advanced Fee Fraud/Nigerian 419:
http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/3056833.html
http://home.rica.net/alphae/419coal/
http://www.secretservice.gov/alert419.shtml