Inside Iowa State: Iowa State University

October 18, 2002

ISU incoming e-mail appears to be about 60 percent spam

If your campus e-mail box has been bulging with baldness cures, mortgage offers and worse lately, you're not alone. Universities across the country, including Iowa State, are reporting dramatic surges in spam.

In this Q&A, Warren Madden, vice president for business and finance, and Kent Ziebell, e-mail expert in Academic Information Technologies, answer questions about spam at Iowa State.

How much of the e-mail coming into Iowa State is spam?
Ziebell: We average close to 2 million incoming e-mail messages each week, and lately, about 60 percent of that appears to be spam.

Has the spam been particularly heavy recently?
Ziebell: Yes. Things got really bad Sunday, Oct. 13. Huge amounts of mail were coming in from what appeared to be an optingnow.com domain. The addresses actually were forged, so we don't know where the mail was coming from. Several other universities reported the same problem.

Can you block mail coming from spammers?
Ziebell: We currently block about 300 domains and I.P. addresses because they have consistently caused us problems by overloading our servers with spam. But you can't block mail coming from fake addresses.

Is the university selling our e-mail addresses to spammers?
Madden: The faculty, staff and student information that's in the ISU directory is considered public information and by state law, we're required to provide it to whoever asks for it. We're also legally required to make the information available in electronic form. We charge a processing fee to cover the costs of providing the lists. But we don't encourage the use of these lists or make a profit from them. Even if we did not have an ISU directory, we would probably have to make this kind of information public, as it meets the test of being a public record. We don't believe that the sale of ISU directory information actually has much effect on the level of spam on campus, because we really don't get many requests for the lists.

Ziebell: Spammers have lots of other ways to get e-mail addresses. They write programs that surf the Internet, collecting names from online phone books, web pages and chat rooms. Or they get your name when you sign up for things online.

Can I take my name off the ISU directory?
Madden: Students can request that their e-mail and other information not be included in the directory by contacting the office of the registrar, 214 Alumni Hall. We discourage faculty and staff from making that request because we need to be available to students and to Iowans, as part of our service to the state. However, faculty and staff who have good reason to keep their information private can make such a request with the approval of supervisors to human resource services.

I started getting lots of spam right after AIT's new spam detector began operating? Any connection?
Ziebell: No connection at all. The spam detector does not provide e-mail addresses to spammers or in any way contribute to increased spam on campus. It's there to help you handle your junk e-mail, if you choose, by filtering likely spam into separate mail folders. For details on how to use the filters, see http://www.ait.iastate.edu/spam/.

How can I reduce spam?
Ziebell: Don't reply to messages from spammers, don't click links in spam and don't click the "unsubscribe" link on spam. . (Unsubscribe links are frequently used to verify that the address is valid. The recipient of the spam has no way of recognizing a VALID unsubscribe link.) Avoid signing up for "free" services on the Internet or putting your e-mail address on warranty cards or providing it in chat rooms.