Preventing Spam

Scenario: Reclaiming your inbox

Every time you open your email, you have unsolicited messages in your mailbox. Sometimes there are just a few, but other times there are dozens of unwanted messages about pornography, jobs, prizes, and financial claims. You may have tried unsubscribing from these lists but it just seems to make it worse, and you want to know if there’s a way to make the spam stop.

What you can do

Spam is everywhere, but there are some things you can do to prevent it from overwhelming your inbox:

• Enable CITES Spam Control on your @uiuc.edu email account.
  CITES Spam Control gives you the choice of whether to ignore, quarantine, or automatically delete email that appears to be spam. For more information, see CITES Spam Control.

• Use your UIUC email account only for University-related activities.
  If your email address is available only in a few locations and used for correspondence with only a few people, there are fewer opportunities for spam-senders to acquire your address.

• Use email filters.
  Sometimes you can feel overwhelmed by email that isn't spam but also isn't urgent -- for example, you may wish to have mail from a campus mailing list redirected to a mailing list folder so that you can review it later. With email filters, you can "pre-sort" your email and direct some of it to other locations before it reaches your inbox. For more information, see How to Create Filters Using the CITES Express Email Web Interface.

• Learn to be more cautious when reading your email.
  For example, if you receive an email message claiming that your account for some financial service has been compromised or disconnected, do NOT click on any link provided in the email. This scam, most commonly known as phishing, attempts to fool users into providing their login names and passwords to fraudulent copies of legitimate sites. See the government's How Not to Get Hooked by a Phishing Scam for more information, and check the Anti-Phishing Working Group for examples of frauds and phishing emails that have been reported recently.

• Be more careful when sending email and publishing web pages.
  For example, don't use your University email address to subscribe to newsgroups with Web interfaces, because any messages you send will make your address available to spammers. Similarly, don't post your email address on a web page; instead, use a comment form that hides your email address but still sends you feedback.

For more details on these prevention techniques, see Tips on Avoiding Spam. The best form of prevention is learning more about the different kinds of spam so you can protect yourself from unwanted attacks.

You're not alone in the fight against spam. CITES Spam Control can dramatically reduce the amount of spam you receive. For examples of ways that you can use CITES Spam Control to assist in your email management, see Spam Control Scenarios.