Every month, over a half-million emails are received by Carlow's email servers. Many of these emails are "unsolicited commercial 
email"  --popularly known as SPAM. Their subject lines may read "Win A Trip!" or "I want to meet you" (or worse!). They are usually sent by a person who you do not know, from a company that you are not aware of.

Most people find this annoying, and many users spend from a few minutes to 30 minutes daily ridding their email box of these emails. This begs the question- What can be done? Here are a few tips….

1) DO NOT UNSUBSCRIBE FROM SPAM EMAIL! At the bottom of most SPAM emails, there will be a tag line that kindly offers to remove you from the email list. Unfortunately, by `unsubscribing' you are actually confirming that you received the 
email and that your email address is valid. The next day, or within a few hours, your email will be even further distributed to countless lists because the programs now know that they have hit a valid email address.

2) DO NOT PUBLISH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS ON A WEBSITE! There are 'bots' that travel the web non-stop and search for web text that contains email addresses. Once found, the email addresses are harvested, and automatically subscribed to various email lists.

3) DO NOT POST TO NEWSGROUPS! As with websites, there are computer programs that harvest email addresses from newsgroup postings. This collection method is even easier because your email address must be valid if you posted to the newsgroup. If you must post to email groups, create yourself an easily disposable email address on hotmail or yahoo.com.

4) If you use Carlow's Lotus email system, you can block email from specific sources. More information is available on that subject later in the article.

What is Carlow doing to help with the SPAM problem? A group was formed in the Spring of 2004 to include representatives from the faculty, staff, students, and Sisters of Mercy. This group met and discussed the extent of the problem on campus. The group further discussed various education initiatives, including speaking at faculty meetings, information in the Blackboard computer orientation course for new students, and publicizing articles such as this.

The group also discussed the difficulty of universally filtering email based upon specific keywords because these words may need to be legitimately used by the health-related programs taught by Carlow. The group will meet again soon and more information will be forth-coming.

Currently, Carlow has a limited ability to filter email. This can be done on an individual user basis by filtering certain emails through Lotus Notes. Information on this can be found on this page In addition, we are currently investigating an anti-SPAM appliance that can be used in conjunction with Lotus to block SPAM to campus on a more universal basis. Unfortunately, these appliances are expensive and they also take a few months to configure properly.

If you'd like help filtering your email, or further information about SPAM, call our I.T. helpdesk at x8700 or visit the IT site