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UVic Systems—with your help— keeps the email flowing
By Sherri Puentes Graveran
Not to be confused with a luncheon meat--spam, the electronic equivalent of junk mail--has become a serious problem for many organizations including the University of Victoria. On average UVic receives 1.5 million email messages per day, approximately two-thirds of which (1 million) are discarded as they are considered spam.
Recently, hacked or stolen UVic Exchange email accounts have been used to intentionally send spam. Most Internet service providers have sophisticated software filters in place to detect and control spam, and as a result of these incidents, Hotmail temporarily placed the university on its “blacklist,” blocking access to their customers.
UVic is actively researching ways to reduce spam and has recently implemented stronger countermeasures to protect the university’s reputation and prevent future sanctions by Internet service providers such as Hotmail and others.
Spam is a global problem that affects both incoming and outgoing email—even legitimate bulk emails that are sent from the university to non-UVic addresses. Senders of such innocuous bulk emails could be regarded by email service providers as a source of spam, making it difficult for them to deliver the message to their audience. To help the university reduce spam, we encourage users to protect their resources both inside and outside UVic.
The following tips can help individuals and departments avoid spam and ensure important emails are delivered reliably.
To avoid receiving spam:
- Don’t reply to spam or attempt to unsubscribe. This simply validates your email address, causing you to receive more spam.
- Be extremely careful about using your email address on websites—it’s often difficult to tell which sites will share your address with spammers.
- Don’t share your personal credentials with others.
Check your Inbox often and delete old and/or no-longer-needed messages on a regular basis.
- Empty your Trash—deleted messages are moved to the Trash folder but are not removed from the system.
To ensure your outgoing emails are delivered reliably:
- Avoid sending lengthy messages or large attachments that occupy large amounts of storage on the university’s email system. Placing the file on a website or SharePoint site makes it readily available without using local disk space.
Offices sending bulk emails to students should endeavour to use the students’ UVic email addresses.
- Choose your language carefully when crafting email messages. If you do need to use words that might be filtered, don’t attempt to obfuscate words with extra characters or odd spellings, which will just make your messages appear more spam-like.
- Use capitalization sparingly—avoid using capitalized subject lines.
- Watch your punctuation–using punctuation marks such as ‘!!!’ or ‘$$$’ or unusual punctuation like ‘*’ or ‘^’ draws unnecessary attention to your email message.
- Review subject lines and content. Common problems are words and characters like Free, Hello, Guarantee, a number, a ‘$’ sign or white space. Words in all capitals are typically picked up.
Additional security tips:
www.uvic.ca/systems/about/informationsecurity/ and
www.uvic.ca/systems/status/features/phishing.php
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