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Please read the first section to become better acquainted with what spam is and how you can receive spam E-mail.

NOTE: All information in this section is Copyright 1997-2006, The Trustees of Indiana University and all links will take you to there Web site. To return to this page click "BACK" at the top of your Web browser.

What is spam?

The term "spam" is Internet slang that refers to unsolicited commercial email (UCE) or unsolicited bulk email (UBE). Some people refer to this kind of communication as junk email to equate it with the paper junk mail that comes through the US Mail. Unsolicited email is email that you did not request; it most often contains advertisements for services or products. There are very few reputable marketers using UCE to advertise goods and services. The most commonly seen spam includes the following:

How spammers operate

Unlike junk paper mail, email spam costs the sender very little to send; almost all of the costs are paid by the recipient and the carriers, because the spammer does not have to pay for all the Internet bandwidth tied up in the delivery of the spam. Because they have no incentive to be efficient in their mass emailing, spammers usually don't put much effort into verifying email addresses; they use automatic programs called bots to scour the web and Usenet newsgroups, collecting addresses, or buy them in bulk from other companies. Spammers also guess at addresses using name generation programs, and even send thousands of messages that bounce. In order to get a single response, spammers are willing to send out a thousand email messages or ten thousand; it makes very little difference to them.

Many spam emailers use tricks to get you to read their messages. For example, they use the "Subject:" line to entice you to open the message. Because of the tricks spammers use to send the email to you, your email address may not even be visible in the "To:" line of the message, and you almost never see the email addresses of the other people they sent the message to. The worst thing about spam, though, is that the spammers use tricks that help disguise the origin of their messages.

One of the spammer's most common tricks is to relay messages through the email server of an innocent third party. This tactic doubles the damages: both the receiving system and the innocent relay system are flooded with spam. And for any mail that gets through, often the flood of complaints goes back to the innocent site because it was made to look like the origin of the spam. Many spammers send their spam from a free account from a large ISP such as AOL, Yahoo!, or Hotmail, then abandon the account and open a new one to use for the next assault. Another common trick that spammers use is to forge the headers of messages, making it appear as though the message originated elsewhere. This is called spoofed email. There are some pieces of information in the full headers that the spammer cannot forge, but even after technical investigation into the source of the message, most often the resulting information leads to a dead end, usually an abandoned account or an innocent mail relay server.

Why am I getting spam?

Is your email address on any web pages? Do you post to newsgroups using your Indiana University address? Research by the Federal Trade Commission and by the Center for Democracy and Technology found that email addresses posted on web sites or in newsgroups attract the most spam. A simple way to find out why you're getting so much spam is to type your email address into a search engine, such as google.com. The number of times your address is found by the search may surprise you. Although your IU personal home page isn't indexed by search engines, departmental pages and other official university web sites are. If your address is on one of those, it's definitely available for harvesting. For more information on this topic, see the Knowledge Base document How can I protect my web pages from email address harvesting?

You might also receive spam if you fill out online forms or correspond with certain companies via email. Although most reputable sites have good privacy policies and won't share your information, it is up to you to decide what sites you trust not to sell your address to spammers.

Indiana University does not and will not sell your information. Moreover, IU will not share your information except in cases when that sharing is consistent with the university's mission or is required by law. For instance, IU has a legal requirement to provide directory information, including email addresses, to the US military for all eligible recruits. This information is required under the terms of the Solomon Amendment, which requires male students to register with the Selective Service to be eligible for Title IV Federal Student Financial Aid.

What to do

Spam has increasingly become a problem on the Internet, and even though there may be state or federal laws concerning some types of unsolicited email (most often the fraudulent kind), these laws do not address all types of spam email and it can be very costly to pursue spammers through the courts. Although computer experts are constantly designing better and better ways to filter out unwanted mail, the spammers are also constantly devising ways to get around those technical solutions. It is a very frustrating situation for users as well as for technical support personnel. It is a basic fact of Internet life that if you use the Internet, you will get unsolicited email.

Fortunately, there are some things that you can do that may help reduce the amount of spam you receive (for more information, see the Knowledge Base document What can I do to avoid receiving spam email?) and some things Indiana University does to help reduce the amount of spam you receive (for more information, see the Knowledge Base document What does IU do to protect users from spam and virus-infected email?).


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