Here's how to keep spam in the canby George SpainCCIT Technical Publisher From mildly annoying to the outright nasty, unsolicited e-mail, called spam, is as prevalent as junk mail flyers in your home’s mail slot—and more difficult to avoid. Spammers range from the well meaning but clueless to the porn industry’s most tenacious dealers. Somewhere along the way they got your e-mail address—surprisingly easy to do—and put you on their list. In some very rare cases (the clueless), the spammer uses his own business location and e-mail address offering a menu, gift baskets, sale items, etc. This happened recently when a local restaurant sent a menu along with solicitation for business to some departments’ employees. A spokesperson for the restaurant said the e-mail list came from a former employee of MUSC. The spokesperson didn’t know that some who received the solicitation objected to the spam. Some business owners see such offers as legitimate advertising and are surprised when recipients are annoyed. Most spammers, however, know very well that their solicitations are intrusive, and so they hide their true identity with a dummy return address, while their offers for a wide range of products point only to Web sites or 900-numbers. They are able to send their spam with a dummy return address by using what’s known as “open relays.” An open relay is a carelessly configured mail server anywhere on the Internet that will forward mail from any sender (even those from a fictitious address) to any recipient. By finding and exploiting these open relays on the Internet, spammers can send to thousands of addresses while masking their own. How do you get on the list and what can be done if you do? You get on a spam list in a couple of ways. First, by giving out your e-mail address in return for downloading a program, filling out a coupon, requesting more information, etc. Anytime you fill out anything on the Web that requires an e-mail address, you will probably wind up on someone’s mailing list. Second, another person in your family or at your work may have contributed your address by forwarding a message or responding to “all” on a mailing list. Third, spammers can hack into unsecured computer systems and get mailing lists. This last is the most unlikely with your MUSC account since the mail system here is secured. In most cases, there is very little that e-mail administrators can do about spam. Because “some spam is addressed completely at random, you have a practically zero chance of receiving no spam,” said Richard Gadsden, director of security at the Center for Computing and Information Technology (CCIT). His advice is, “Don’t share your MUSC address with anyone you don’t trust.” Some people recommend getting a free, “junk” e-mail account (like hotmail.com) and using this address when you fill out Internet forms. Of course, you shouldn’t be surprised when that address is spammed, but it would at least keep spam from that source out of your MUSC mailbox. Another way to deal with spam is by using filters. Filters come in two main types: local filters which act on mail which arrives at your inbox and server-side filters, which act on mail when it arrives at the server. Local filters depend upon the client you’re using (Netscape, Mulberry, Groupwise, etc.), while server-side filters depend on the type of server being used. All three of the e-mail clients mentioned above allow filtering. At present the only server-side filtering agent available is procmail, a program that’s difficult to use. “The next version of the IMAP server will support server-side filtering through a protocol called sieve. And the upcoming Internet connection server will support rejection of mail from known open relays,” said Mike Coffman, a system administrator at CCIT. The current Mulberry client is ready to support sieve filtering when it becomes available on the IMAP server. With spam: Do and Don’tCCIT’s Mike Coffman and Richard Gadsden recently responded to the problem of spam with this Do and Don’t list:Don’t:
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