I’m going to be a Senior this fall and I have never had a problem with junk mail until the past couple of months. It usually has the word ***SPAM*** in the subject title, but not always. After myUSI got back up from your upgrades, I had six ***SPAM*** e-mails. Is there any way to make this stop? It’s getting pretty annoying.
Spam is a major problem on the Internet. Despite laws passed against it, it is said that the rate of spam mail being sent across the Internet has at least doubled over the past two years. If you look at some old statistics from our spam fighting gateway, you’ll see that we discarded a total 1000729 messages, or 58% of all mail traffic to USI, as known SPAM messages.
The problem is that it is hard for machines to identify SPAM, but pretty easy for a human. So what is obviously SPAM to you might not be easy for a computer to classify as SPAM.
We have a mail gateway set up that looks at each message that comes to USI and uses a variety of time tested techniques to check to see if a message is SPAM or not. As it goes through the process the message is scored based on how many hits it gets for being more or less SPAM-like.
Based on a threshold score that we set, the message is either discarded as obvious spam (for having a very high spam score), passed along as being potential spam (where the software rewrites the subject line of the message and changes it to include ***SPAM***) so that you, as a knowledgable human, can make the final decision about what to do with it (this is done for messages with a mid range score that is just below our SPAM threshold score), or passed on without modifications as probably not spam (for having a low score or having scored no points at all).
When you are saying that you are recieving a lot of messages with ***SPAM*** in the subject line, it means that our software is doing its job. It can’t tell without a doubt that the message is spam, but it thinks that it might be. As such, it lets you know so you can delete it if you like.
It is possible for legitemate messages to be marked with the ***SPAM*** tag because it has characteristics similar to SPAM (such as being written in ALL CAPS, using no punctuation, having only images as the content, etc). As we don’t want to throw away legitimate email, we err on the side of caution and set our threshold score somewhat high. Even as such, we still discard over a million messages a month.
The other benefit of the ***SPAM*** tag is that it allows you to set up filters in myUSI to automatically “process” messages that have been tagged as SPAM email. Filters allow you to take any message with ***SPAM*** or ***spam*** in the Subject line of an email and automatically put them in another folder (you can find out about creating folders in this myUSI FAQ article. Then you would just want to check that folder every once in a while and delete its contents. You can find out more about filtering your email in this myUSI FAQ article.