SPAM for Breakfast

While enjoying a cup of coffee at home early one morning, you sit down in front of your computer. You have a long day of classes and work ahead of you, and want to make sure no important emails will affect your daily schedule. You open your UNM email account only to find that your inbox has been completely overtaken by spam. It’s everywhere. As you stare at the screen in awe at the hundreds of spam messages, even more messages are still coming in. What’s even more frustrating is these messages are not typical spam messages -- most of them are from Mailer-Daemon stating that your message could not be delivered, or was blocked from the recipient. This insinuates that your email address has been sending out spam to other users.

Just two weeks ago ITS locked you out of your account as you forgot to change your NetID’s password (a nuisance all of its own). The constraints for creating your new password were so difficult to abide by (and equally difficult to remember), surely no one could have compromised your extremely secure password already? But alas, here you sit at your computer screen with hundreds, possibly thousands, of apparently undeliverable spam emails from the Mailer-Daemon for messages that you did not send.

This issue is one that many deal with at the University of New Mexico; the ITS Support Center receives calls from UNM individuals every day who believe that their account has been compromised due to these spam messages. The reality is that the “spammers” are not actually gaining access to your account, nor is this issue related to the integrity of UNM’s email system.

Spam messages can be sent using various applications that make the return address “appear” to be any address the spammer chooses – therefore messages they send use headers that look as though your account is spamming others, when actually it is not. Replying to the sender and requesting to stop sending you spam will only verify to the spammer that you are a human – and could actually increase your amount of spam.

Alas, it seems the only way to tackle spam is to stop it at the source. Limit your distribution of your email address by only giving it out to trusted people. Create a free email account online and use it exclusively for signing up on web sites.

Emails that arrive in your UNM email often contain what is called a “subject-tag” which shows a percentage indicating the likelihood that the email is spam in content. If emails ever arrive not subject-tagged to your UNM inbox you can forward them to spamdrop@unm.edu to assist UNM with their spam filtering.

A quick search query for “spam” in UNM’s FastInfo knowledge base (http://fastinfo.unm.edu) found many answers relating to UNM’s policies on spam and what is being done about it. These resources indicate that a number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have reported an estimated 30-50% of all users’ email traffic to be spam. In addition, 80% of people claim that spam is among their top annoyances when using computers.

Of course these statistics provide little comfort to you, and what was intended to be your morning coffee break will now consist of repetitious trashing of spam messages. The question we need to ask is “what can be done to help stomp out SPAM”? I encourage any suggestions or feedback for methods to reduce spam attacks. The Internet is filled with resources for eliminating spam, but most of them do not work. What options do we have as innocent bystanders of the electronic communications, and how can we fight off SPAM? Perhaps one day we will live in a spam free virtual environment, but until then -- looks like you'll be having spam for breakfast.