Fighting Spam

Topics on this page

• Filter Out Junk Mail (Spam) With the Email Delivery Manager
• UW Email Discards the Worst Spam
• How You Can Help Fight Spam

Filter Out Junk Mail (Spam) With the Email Delivery Manager

Spam is unsolicited "junk mail" that clutters up your Inbox and generally irritates everyone. Nearly 80% of the email received by the UW on a monthly basis is now spam.

To try to control this flood of useless messages, all UW Email accounts now have their Junk Email Filter turned on by default.

Incoming email received by the central UW Email systems is evaluated and given a "spam score" estimating the likelihood of each message being spam. Messages with a high score are placed in a separate "junk-mail" folder.

You can go to the Email Delivery Manager to adjust the level of filtering you prefer (you can even turn off Junk Email filtering, but we do not recommend doing so). For a detailed explanation of the system, see Junk email (spam) filtering at the UW.

The scoring system is not perfect - sometimes messages you do not consider to be spam will end up in your junk-mail folder. You have one week from the arrival of the message to check the junk-mail folder for such messages. Any messages in the junk-mail folder more than one week old will be discarded each night.

UW Email Discards the Worst Spam

Because of the massive volume of these useless messages, the UW Email system automatically filters out and discards all inbound and outbound messages with a spam score equal to or greater than 99%. If this is a problem for you, please send email to help@u.washington.edu

How You Can Help Fight Spam

You can help stop spam by taking the following steps:

• Use the Junk Email Filter in the Email Delivery Manager.
• Maintain your computer properly so that there is less risk that it will be infected by viruses and worms, which are a major source of spam.
• If your computer gets infected by viruses or worms, immediately take it off the network and disinfect it before connecting again. An infected computer can send out thousands of spam messages per second.
• Do not reply to any unsolicited email. Unfortunately, spammers often use "social engineering," such as cries for help or amazing offers, to entice you into responding. At the same time, if the message is from some organization, business, or service you know, and you have chosen to be on its email list, replying is safer.
• Do not click "remove me" or "reply to remove" links in spam. Many spammers interpret such responses as verification that the address is valid and sell your address to more spam lists.
• Never go to a Web site listed or discussed in spam messages. The links in the spam often are written to tell the Web site which address the message was sent to. When you visit the site you are just verifying that your email address if valid. Result; more spam.
• Never buy anything that has been advertised in spam ("spamvertized"). Sending spam is so cheap that even very low rates of sales make sending millions of messages cost effective.
• Do not put your UW email address into newsgroup postings, chat rooms, or on Web sites where they can be easily collected by spammers building address lists.
• Check privacy policies for any business that asks for your email address. If they do not give you reasonable control of who will get your address, do not give it to them.