Today's Headlines Archived Headlines S ince the introduction of electronic mail to the University of Houston, customers have enjoyed the privileges of Internet access. But, sometimes unwanted visitors intrude with messages know as spam. Although spam is a common nuisance, it can be difficult to trace. A lot of times, spam can be followed to the original server, but it may have been compromised by an outside source while its owner remained unaware of the situation.
Spammers have a number of attacks, but all spam begins with obtaining the customer's mail address.
Spammers can obtain the addresses from a variety of sources with very little effort, but savvy customers can take some precautions to ensure they do not give out their addresses. As a general policy, IT recommends customers not return electronic mail that they do not recognize, since the reply can also serve as a confirmation to the company that they have reached an active address. UH chooses not to filter all of the incoming messages for spam, since doing so would place a tremendous burden on the processing speed of the system. Keep the subject filter short, to catch all of the variations of a common mailing. Many spammers put numbers at the end of subject lines to prevent filters from working.