Spam served daily to e-mail accounts

There has been an increase in e-mail spam during the past year at Pitt, and only 25 percent of… There has been an increase in e-mail spam during the past year at Pitt, and only 25 percent of students are protecting themselves.

Pitt’s spam filter system offers different levels of aggressiveness to block spam, but students must turn it on first. The lenient setting will only catch the obvious, like blatantly explicit words or messages from known “spammers” – people who send out spam. The aggressive setting is more in-depth, but it still doesn’t mean that everything will always be caught.

According to Jinx Walton, the director of Pitt’s Computing Services and Systems Development, spammers are finding e-mail addresses that are posted on Web sites or on their victims’ e-mail address books. They are also trying harder to get their messages through by developing new tricks so that filter systems will not detect them.

“Spammers are becoming more sophisticated as many [people] are now using filters,” Walton said. “It takes the [spam filtering] company time to get up to speed with new gimmicks.”

In fact, spam has increased 62 percent across the country since January 2002, Walton said, and there is a higher percentage of spam being sent to Pitt accounts than there is worldwide.

But there’s still hope. Pitt’s spam filtering system blocked 19 million junk e-mail messages in 2005.

To adjust your spam settings, log into www.my.pitt.edu. Click on “webmail” at the top of the page. Then, click the “message center” on the right side of the screen. A “junk e-mail settings” link will be at the top of the page; select it.

Next, click “on” to activate the spam filter. The “on” icon will turn green once it is activated. Under the spam filters heading, you can select your desired aggressiveness of the filtering system. You must click “save changes” when you are done.

Categories for filtering include: sexually explicit, get rich quick, special offers and racially insensitive.

If spam is found, you will be sent an e-mail about it from the Technology Help Desk, and you can access it or delete it through the message center as well. A quarantined message will automatically be removed from the page 14 days after it was quarantined.

Anne Marie Price, a student who uses the spam filter system, is satisfied by its overall effectiveness.

“I use my filter and it works beautifully, but it sometimes blocks things I want, but I just go to the message center to view them,” Price said. “I like the Pitt e-mail overall. It’s much better than Yahoo.”

To help adjust the problem of friendly e-mails being quarantined, you may also create an approved senders list and a blocked senders list to help the system sort whose e-mails should go to your inbox and whose should go to the junk e-mail box.

Along with the spam filtering system, virus protection is also available for Pitt e-mail and it is automatically activated when you are given an account. This feature blocked 7 million e-mails with viruses last year alone. These viruses may also attack everyone on an address book.

CSSD has posted flyers and sent out postcards to students to promote the spam filtering service. Information about it can be found on my.pitt.edu or from the Technology Help Desk.