| Spam invades University
Spam mail is a daily affliction experienced by all Bowling Green students. No student's BGnet e-mail account is completely safe from receiving these unwanted and often tedious e-mails.
A.J. Fuller, Unix Systems Administrator at the University, said spam mail is electronic junk/bulk mail that is typically from a commercial source. In a broader sense of the word "spam," phishing credit card companies and bank scams also qualify as spam mail.
The sources of spam mail are various, but the largest contributor are machines that are enacted by a virus, A.J. Fuller said. These machines infect computers with a virus, take out all contacts from an address book and send spam to these addresses. Although facebook.com and other social networking sites are a contributor, they are a minor source.
King of spam : Sifting through thousands of junk messages
In years past, those three words were probably music to your ears. Every time you opened your e-mail account it could have meant numerous possibilities — an update from a family member away from home, a simple "hello" or a quick answer to a question.
Today, those three words can mean much less. With the billions of spam mail sent to e-mail addresses throughout the world on a daily basis, there is a good chance you've got mail — however, it is probably not the type of mail you want to see.
For Frantz Sturm, thousands of e-mail messages await him each day when he arrives at work. Although a large number of those messages are legitimate, the majority are not.
Because spam is a hassle to deal with, many Internet Service Providers and software companies are continually coming up with new strategies to lower the amount of spam a person receives.
New junk mail filter gets mixed reception
Networking Services and Information Technologies (NSIT) rolled out a new $170,000 junk e-mail manager in mid-December with hopes of better protection of cMail inboxes from bulk and spam e-mail. “[It] performs much better than the old one," said NSIT Director Bob Bartlett. “In fact, in tests we did locally, the new filter was 10 times more effective at filtering bulk and spam e-mail than the old one." The new software sorts e-mail into approved, bulk, and spam mail. “Approved mail goes directly into your inbox. Bulk and spam mail get quarantined by the filter. Then, depending on your settings, the filter sends you an e-mail entitled ‘Junk Mail Manager Summary' once a day, week, or month to tell you which e-mails have been quarantined," Bartlett said. Campus reaction to the new filter was mixed, with responses varying from apathy or annoyance to approval.
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