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The senders of Bulk Unsolicited Email, usually known as SPAM, use many thousands of addresses, accepting that some will be incorrect. Replying to a spam message confirms that your address exists, and reaches someone who reads the mail.
Spam is annoying, and frequently offensive. But in very few cases is it aimed at you personally. You are just one of thousands of potential recipients. It isn't worth worrying about: just delete it and get on with something else.
Email coming from off-campus is assessed for the likelihood of it being Spam. If it is considered sufficiently likely to be so, it has {SPAM?} added to the Subject header. But the tests cannot be infallible: invariably, some Spam will get through untagged, and (worse) some non-spam will be tagged. So it is best to have tagged messages moved to a subfolder, which you can glance at from time to time before deleting the mail. This webpage shows you how. Usually, a glance at the subject line will tell you which messages you really want to see.
If you need to send a large file to a number of people, email may not be the best medium. Consider setting up the item as a webpage and emailing just the URL, or using the Essex Zendto Service.
If you do, they will be automatically harvested by programs, and used to send you spam. If you wish to tell readers of your page how to email you, it should be done in some disguised form, such as
This page was last modified by Alan Stanier
on 17 June 2011.
E-mail: alan; non-Essex users should add @essex.ac.uk to create full e-mail
address.
Further advice on this can be found on our pages for web designers
The Computing Service does all it can to prevent viruses reaching your hard disks. Email coming from off-campus is checked at least three times before reaching your mailbox. And your M-drive is scanned daily. But we cannot guarantee to catch every single virus. So you should
The Computing Service virus pages give further details
There are some risks of using the Out-Of-Office facility, and in general we recommend only using it to reply to internal messages. If, however, you feel you need to send Out-Of-Office messages off-campus, please bear the following in mind.
The Out-of-Office Assistant sends an automatic reply from your e-mail address to the sender of all email, telling them that you are (for example) away from the University, and will deal with their mail on your return. This is undeniably useful, but it does also reply to Spam mail, despite our advice above. You must decide for yourself whether the usefulness of the auto-reply facility outweighs the risk of attracting spam.
To protect your colleagues, do not put their email addresses in your Out-Of-Office message.
There is no way to stop the Out-of-Office message going to mailing lists, which can cause annoyance to other list members. It is often best to unsubscribe temporarily from mailing lists while you are away.
Email apparently from a friend or colleague may in fact not be so, as it is trivially easy to forge Mail headers. Spam senders now do so as a matter of course, and many viruses forge feasible looking email from the sender's stored mail. This can cause much confusion and inconvenience, both for the forged sender and the forged site (we have been the victim several times) but there is little to be done with current email protocols.
The Outlook Rules Wizard lets you automate many common functions, such as moving mail to subfolders. Here is a typical example, demonstrating the setting-up of a rule to move mail tagged as SPAM to a sub-folder. Please note that this is a better course of action than merely deleting tagged email, as some mail you may wish to read may also be tagged.
Chain mail, where you are asked to send email on to a number of other people, and encourage them to continue the chain, both annoys the recipients and loads our mail systems even more.
One common form of chain mail is hoax virus warnings. Typically these purport to alert you to a new and virulent virus, and urge you to take action against it, and spread the word to all your friends. Do not do either of these! If in any doubt about such a warning, look at our list of current hoaxes or contact the Service Help Desk.
If you receive suspicious-looking email, the best thing to do is delete it unread. But if you have the Outlook Reading Pane open, and you select the item even just to delete it, your machine will read the content and may be infected by any viruses embedded in it.
Outlook allows you to tailor the behaviour of individual email messages by setting delivery options. You may, for example, specify that the message is urgent, have replies sent to another address, deliver at some future date, etc
Your colleagues have the same problems with email you do. Please remember our advice on how not to add to them