JUNK E-MAIL OR SPAM

Junk e-mail ? also known as SPAM ? clogs your Inbox, wastes your time, and is just plain annoying. Our e-mail gateway catches a large number of Spam messages; however, some unwanted messages may still get delivered.

So what can be done to remove these unwanted messages? The quickest and easiest method is liberal use of the delete key. Not an elegant solution, but very quick and relatively foolproof. Another option is to set up filters on your local e-mail client. Outlook, Pegasus, Eudora and most other e-mail clients support user-defined filtering rules. The advantage of a local filter is that the decision is totally yours as to what constitutes spam and what to do with it.

As a precaution, be aware that sometimes attempting to unsubscribe from SPAM lists may actually have the reverse effect - a common result is that the respondent is more heavily targeted, since any response (even an unsubscribe me!) tells the sender that their message is being read.

You may also wish to disable preview panes if your mail client supports such functionality. HTML (web-enabled) e-mail may contain hidden web bugs that reports your activity back to the advertiser the moment your e-mail client opens the preview.

In addition, some of the messages you see may appear to come from csus.edu addresses. Such addresses are almost always forgeries. The nature of e-mail allows the spammers to create bogus message headers in an attempt to disguise their identity and fool certain anti-spam methods.

Last Updated: July 8, 2010