HELP: Dealing with Spam
What is Spam? Who sends it?
Spam is unsolicited commercial email. To find out what canned lunch meat has to do with commercial email, visit this page on Hormel's web site.
Some spam is sent by "direct marketing" firms (similar to the ones who call you at home during dinner), but these days, most spam is sent by infected PCs in homes and businesses. More than three-fourths of the email on the 'net is now spam. To read more about spam, who sends it, and how to stop it, try one of the following links:
- Spamhaus researches who sends you all that spam (most of it is from a few big spammers).
- CAUCE: Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. Advocates for a legislative solution to spam. Has many links to other resources.
What does the COE system to do to block spam?
The COE email server blocks and discards email from some domains belonging to known spammers, pornographers, and commercial "direct marketers". Since Fall 2003, we have used the Spamhaus block list to identify spammers.
Starting in Summer 2006, the COE mail gateway also uses Symantec's Brightmail anti-spam technology to identify and discard spam. Here are some features of Brightmail:
- Catches spam with a 95 percent effectiveness rate.
- Prevents false positives with a 99.9999 percent accuracy rate (less than 1 false positive in every million messages).
- Automatic, timely, and secure updates every 5 to 10 minutes.
- Built on award-winning technology that protects over 300 million users worldwide.
- Brightmail AntiSpam solutions are used to filter over 15 percent of worldwide email and over 100 billion emails per month.
- Nine of the top 12 U.S. Internet Service Providers rely on Brightmail AntiSpam solutions to protect their subscribers.
- Backed by global operations centers in the United States, Ireland, Australia, and Taiwan.
The mail gateway also scans incoming email for viruses and deletes infected attachments.
Our acceptable use policy forbids any commercial or for-profit use of the COE system. This policy gives us the right to refuse commercial mass-mailings to our users.
It is possible that the system may block some email about "special offers" or "hot babes" that you actually wanted to receive. Please use some other account for this kind of email.
As of May 20, 2004, the FCC is requiring all explicit email advertising to contain the string "SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT" in the subject line. Such messages will be discarded by the COE mail server.