SPAM: Unsolicited Commercial Email or Junk Mail!
There are two major types of SPAM, both of which you may see daily:
- Email that is trying to sell you something:
"Lose up to 82% of your unwanted body fat with X"
- Email that is trying to get information from you, or phishing email:
"Your email account is about to be deactivated! Respond with your password to continue".
Tip: DeSales IT staff, including the Help Desk, will never ask for your password or other confidential information (e.g. birth date, user name, address) through an email message. Delete these messages without opening them.
Like most organizations, we utilize email filters to block most of the junk email sent to the desales.edu domain. However, the filter provider(s) and the SPAMmers are constantly battling to outwit each other. Often, there will be times where a fair amount of junk mail will get through, before the email filter gets ahead of the SPAMmers again.
Junk Mail is a winning business!
Since sending junk mail is virtually free to the SPAMmers, there is no reason for them to stop sending it. Even if one million messages were sent, and only one response was received, the SPAMmer is ahead.
Tip: To avoid phishing scams, do not click a link in an email, but type the address instead. (e.g. If an email is sending you to PayPal, type https://paypal.com instead of clicking the link.)
DeSales IT is currently evaluating new email filtering software, to replace Postini. Watch the Daily for updates!
Use links below for more information
How SPAM works
Avoid Email Scams
Junk email filtering options in Outlook
Gmail SPAM handling