What is Spam?
How do they get my address?
Can I do anything to prevent getting spam?
Can't Computing Services filter it out?
Can I filter it out?

Filtering Spam with WebMail
Junk Mail Controls in Thunderbird

Spam: To indiscriminately send large amounts of unsolicited e-mail meant to promote a product or service. Spam in this sense is sort of like the electronic equivalent of junk mail sent to "Occupant".

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, http://www.foldoc.org, Editor Denis Howe

Email addresses are gathered from Usenet discussion lists, mailing lists, web searches and directory lookups. Spammers also will attempt to guess email addresses by adopting the 'shotgun' approach of sending to asmith, bsmith, csmith, etc. Finally, spammers will buy and sell lists of email addresses. They will use any method possible to add email addresses to their list.

• ***Do not reply to the messages***. Some spam messages will offer to remove you from the mailing list, but are instead just using this as a verification method. If you respond, they know there is someone there to read the mail.


• Limit the exposure of your email address. Only list your Mount Allison email address on a web page if it is necessary. Spammers use tools to read all the web pages on a server and extract email addresses. If you must list an email address, you can try 'obfuscating' it. For example: "jsmith_@_mta.ca" or "jsmith at mta dot ca." Unfortunately, this can also impede understanding and prevent communication.


• Acquire another email address from a 'free' service. This tip falls into the same category as above,"limiting your exposure." Many web-based services ask for a valid email address as registration. Instead of using your Mount Allison email address for these services, use an alternate email address from a free email provider such as Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) or Hotmail (www.hotmail.com). Using this alternate account for these services, may limit the likelihood of your Mount A email address being 'harvested' by spammers. The disadvantage of this approach is that you will have several email inboxes to check.

Filtering email before it gets delivered to your inbox is 'tricky' subject.

We would love to be able to apply a formula to the incoming email so that only legitimate email reaches your inbox. It is technically possible to reject any message on a number of criteria: where it is coming from, who it is coming from, and even which words and phrases appear in the message. However, in practice there is no easy way to determine whether a particular message is 100% legitimate or not. For this reason we are employing software called Puremessage to "rate" the incoming messages and mark messages that are likely spam.

Because we cannot absolutely say if a particular email message is spam or not, we do not currently do any filtering prior to delivery. Unfortunately, there will always be the possibility that a legitimate message would be rejected. See below for information regarding how you can filter out messages marked as spam. We continue to do research on methods other universities and organizations use to combat spam.

We do perform one filtering operation on incoming mail: we scan for viruses. With this form of scanning, we can say with 100% certainty that either an email message contains a virus or not. We run commercial software from McAfee, the same company that sells the Windows desktop virus software we use on campus. The virus scanning email software works by looking for patterns in each email message that are identified as being the virus itself. In the same way as DNA testing can identify a person, virus scanning software identifies a computer virus. In addition, the software is kept up to date with the latest patterns as the company identifies new viruses. This sort of filtering does not reject email outright but just removes the attachments from the mail that contain the harmful virus and then passes the text of the message on.

Yes! At the individual level you can tell your email software to trash messages or move them to a special 'spam' folder, based on all the criteria above. See the following links for more information: