Email Spam

What can I do about spam?
What is the university doing about spam?
Spam Filtering Service

What can I do about spam?

Besides using the delete button, following these simple suggestions can help deal with a large majority of the spam you receive:

• The University provides tools to assist you in handling spam that reaches your mailbox.  For more information on these tools and how to set them up, please visit the Spam Filtering Service page.
• When filling out paper and online forms, think carefully before providing your email address. Many sites sell their distribution lists to other organizations. If a privacy option is provided, select it to request that your information remain confidential.
• It is generally unwise to follow the "remove" instructions in unsolicited bulk or commercial email (spam). At best, the specified address will be non-working or non-existent and you will receive a delivery error message. At worst, your request will serve as confirmation that your email address is valid, thus making it a valuable commodity which can be sold to other spammers.
• If you use an email program other than Webmail, the email program itself may have Junk mail filtering capabilities. Examples of such programs are Eudora v6.x, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, Netscape Mail v7.x. Consult your email program's Help section to learn how you can configure the email program itself to automatically filter junk email to a Junk folder or call the OIT Help Desk at 574-631-8111 for direct assistance with your email program.
• You may also wish to report the incident to the sender's service provider. Most commercial Internet Service Providers have policies against using their services to deliver unsolicited email, and they may be able to take action against the spammer. You may analyze the message headers and send your own report, you may use SpamCop to prepare and send the report, or you may forward spam (with full email headers) to spamtrap@nd.edu. Messages forwarded to spamtrap@nd.edu will be handled as time permits, and may be used to refine existing spam filters on the campus mail server.

What is the university doing about spam?

Beginning in August 2007, a new campus-wide spam filter (the Sendmail Sentrion) was enabled for all Notre Dame e-mail accounts. Messages from e-mail accounts you may have with other servers (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) that are forwarded to your Notre Dame account will also be automatically filtered for spam. The Sendmail Sentrion product was chosen for its ease of use, the ability to handle the load of email messages coming into Notre Dame from the outside world, and for its reliability, thus enabling the e-mail service to run at its normal high speed.

Only messages originating from outside the Notre Dame network are scanned by the spam filter. Messages sent from a Notre Dame e-mail account, using the Notre Dame e-mail servers, to other Notre Dame e-mail users will NOT be filtered.

Please note: If you are a student whose email account is on Google Apps, spam filtering will be handled through the Google Gmail interface.