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Spam or threatening email

Threatening email

If you have received harassing or threatening email and are concerned for your safety, please contact the UW Police Department (using on campus phones call 9-911, using other phones call 911) or your local law enforcement immediately.

Other threatening messages should be reported to acctinfo@u.washington.edu. Please forward the harassing message, complete with full headers so that the origin of the message can be properly determined. Additional offices that can be helpful are the following:

UW spam filtering

The central UW email services now offer a simple but effective spam filter. For more information, please see Junk email (spam) filtering at the UW

What is spam?

Spam, also known as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), is generally defined as an unsolicited mailing, usually to many people. "Spammers" flood the Internet with many copies of the same email message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. The most commonly seen spam advertise:

Spammers typically use "spoofed" or fake return addresses on their email messages because they know that people don't want to hear from them. This also prevents the spammer from having to bear the cost of receiving responses from people to whom they've sent messages. An increasing number of spammers send most of their mail via innocent intermediate systems. This fills the intermediate systems' networks and disks with unwanted spam messages. It costs virtually nothing for the spammer to send these bulk email ads. But, the Internet Service Providers costs increase due to the additional email load they must handle. If spam continues to grow, it may crowd our mailboxes to the point that they're not useful for real mail anymore.

Spam do's and don'ts

Never respond to spam email. For a spammer, one "hit" among thousands of mailings is enough to justify the practice.

Never respond to the spam email's instructions to reply with the word "remove." This could be a trick to get you to react to the email and will alert the sender that a human is at your address. If you reply, your address may be placed on more lists and you might receive more spam.

Never sign up with sites that promise to remove your name from spam lists. Some of these sites may be sincere, but many times they are spam address collectors. In either case, your address may be recorded and valued more highly because you have just identified it as read by a human.

What should I do if I receive spam?

You should report email abuse to the contacts of the Internet Service Provider (ISP) in which the email originated from. In many cases the 'To:'and 'From:' fields of the email message have been forged. You will need to view the full headers of the email message in order to determine its origin. Once you know its origin, find the network contact information to report the spam.

Examples

Below are some common types of unsolicited commercial email that you might receive, along with some legal actions one might take:

  1. Common "spam" advertising a company, product, or service that is not affiliated with the UW in any way.

    Washington State has an "anti-spam" law, known as the "Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act," (RCW 19.190.020). Use the Washington State Attorney General spam complaint site to report a violation of this act.

  2. Chain letters soliciting money or purchases of "reports" on how to get rich quick by mass-emailing.

    Complaints about this type of spam should be directed at the Federal Trade Commission Spam complaint form.

    Note that chain letters fall under the category "Multi-level marketing".

    Read the FTC Consumer Alert on SPAM.

  3. Letters soliciting assistance in moving large sums of money from another country, donations to charity, providing assistance in collection of money owed by the government or prize winnings, requiring your bank account number or credit card number to get money to you.

    These are fraud, which falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI. Report fraud at the FBI's Internet Fraud Complaint Center.

Resources

You can also recognize which letters are already known to be circulating, or verify the claims made by someone posing as a charity, by checking Web sites that archive scams, frauds, and email hoaxes.