Spam, or junk e-mail, is continuing to grow in spite of increased security, causing headaches for many students, staff and faculty at UW-Madison. Efforts to relieve the effects of it are inevitably temporary since spammers seem to have unlimited tools and numbers.
Spam costs the receiver a lot more then the sender, said Kim Milford, the information security manager for the UW-Madison Division of Information Technology. Very little spam comes from reputable marketers, according to the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email an organization of more than 20,000 members that promotes legislation to ban spam.
According to a study conducted by the European Commission, spam costs Internet users approximately $8.7 billion per year worldwide. Internet service providers and UW-Madison spend a lot of their resources dealing with spam. Just like a person sorting mail at the post office, a computer has to sort all the mail that comes into an ISP. The greater the volume, the harder the computer has to work. An overload on the system will cause it to slow down, create errors and possibly crash.
\Eventually, the ISP will have to upgrade its computers, a cost that is often passed on to the customer,"" said John Mozena of CAUCE.
America Online estimates that out of the 30 million e-mail messages its customers receive each day, about 30 percent are unsolicited. Volumes like this contribute to access, speed and reliability problems. Mozena says large ISPs like AOL and Netcom have suffered major outages as a result of massive junk e-mail campaigns and that small ISPs have been crushed.
There is no really good way for the university to filter unwanted e-mail, Milford said. What one person considers junk may not be junk to another person. However, if a lot of e-mail comes from one source, or if students and faculty complain about getting junk e-mail, DoIT will try to block it.
Lorretta L. Jellings of the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says consumers can protect themselves in several ways. The first is by never responding to spam.
""As soon as you respond, they know they have a live person and will continue to send you e-mail,"" Jellings said.
She added that senders will also discover that you are a live person if you check the box that says, ""Please don't send me any more advertisements."" Spammers respond by sending e-mail from another source.
A second way for people to protect themselves is to set up two accounts: one for sending e-mail to family and friends and for class, and the other for surfing the Web.
""You will get your spam in your surf account and e-mail in another account,"" Jellings said.
Spam won't go away anytime soon, but users can make this Internet annoyance easier to deal with through savvy computing, good citizenship and judicious use of technology, to use e-mail for its original purpose'communication.
