Spam
Spam, a delicious shelf-stable canned meat product packaged in nearby Austin,
Minnesota or nuisance to your email account? Perhaps the answer is both. Spam
(the non-edible kind) is defined as unsolicited email messages generally sent
to a large number of addresses. We often see unsolicited spam messages which
attempt to get us to buy something (think pharmaceutical products as an example)
or attempt to get our credit card or password information. We see spam messages
because it is relatively cheap and easy to target large numbers of people and
because rooting out spammers is difficult.
Email Spam
At Augsburg, spam accounts for 90% of the messages destined for email accounts.
Fortunately, many of the blatant spam messages are filtered by our email system.
Some of the questionable email messages end up in your email account spam trap
so that you can determine their validity and help train the system to recognize
legitimate messages from the spam. The filtering system assigns points to the
email message based on the sender, source of the message, keywords contained
in the message and any files or image attachments. If one of the evaluation
criteria is questionable a point is given to the message. A message is determined
to be spam when it reaches a certain number of points.
Managing Spam
Faculty and staff will receive a daily email digest if any email messages
have been detained in their spam filter. You may access your spam filter
via the link provided in the spam digest email. Access to the spam filter is
also available 24/7 via the Inside Augsburg website (http://inside.augsburg.edu)
or at http://spam.augsburg.edu.
You may use the spam filter to release messages from the trap, add trusted
email addresses to your spam filter and change the aggressiveness of the filter.
After 5 days the spam will be deleted automatically even if you do nothing.
Spam in your spam trap is not counted in your email mailbox quota. Information
about changes you may wish to make to your filter is available via the Augsburg
IT Knowledgebase at http://go.augsburg.edu/spamhelp .
It is important to note that messages sent from your Augsburg email address to
other legitimate Augsburg email address do not pass through the spam filter and
will be delivered.
Questions?
If you have any additional questions about spam filtering on campus, please
refer to the Knowledgebase articles from the link provided above and consult
your Liaison for Computing. If you need delicious recipes for the canned variety
of spam please see the following link: http://www.spam.com/recipe-exchange/recipe-gallery/default.aspx . Spam can even be funny or musical. For example see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE
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