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August 10, 2007
Suddenly Spam
I wondered how long the honeymoon would last. I graduated almost three months ago (really? That long already? Hmph.), and my Seton Hill email is still floating around out there in cyberspace. Only, recently, I've noticed that my cybernaut email address is getting slammed by cyber junk shot from one of those tennis ball machines.
I've forwarded my school email account to another personal account for simplicity's sake, so the spam is being sent to my Mail application on my Mac as well as my Blackberry (since I have said email address also set up for that device). There is no avoiding the spam this time since it's integrating my life post-baccalaureate. Not unlike most full-time professionals, email is a vital part of my everyday routine, perhaps more so because the work I do is centered around the Internet. I liked having all my email sent to one inbox for me to root through, especially since having them arrive together usually meant fewer spam messages altogether. It was like a really really good water filtration system, sending the (potentially) dirtiest water through multiple layers of filtering, straining out only the fresh, usable life source.
I am talking about a lot of spam, folks. Not just one or two like I got during the school year; no, this morning I woke to 37 messages in my inbox. Typically I have like 5-10, a couple of them from friends or family, most of them from various sites I've signed up for like Facebook. Today 32 of them were spam.
Yesterday I got hit with so much spam I lost count of how many messages I deleted. Yesterday I was also up against a deadline for work, and, therefore, relying heavily on the communication from my colleagues. Needless to say, I was a little frustrated with the interference.
Fortunately I know before I click on the message to delete it that it's from my SHU account--there are "rules" to set in Mail and, as someone who lives by color-coding, I have specific actions assigned to each email address I have filtering to this single inbox.
And as I write this I have received 5 more spam messages.
I'm not really sure what I can do about this, though. How do I get the school account disabled? Can I have the forwarding turned off so my inbox isn't assaulted so frequently? Further still, why is this happening out-of-the-blue? Did the IT folk perhaps remove some kind of spam filter from the email addresses of graduates?
I received a message the other day saying that my inbox had been cleaned out, which wasn't a huge deal because I had all of three messages still in there since having the forwarding set up. Is my account being thrown to the wind? They never told us how long we'd have till the email account would be set out into the last frontier all on its own... Really, I thought I would just stop receiving mail from that account altogether rather than being slammed with spam.
Posted by KarissaKilgore at August 10, 2007 7:47 AM
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Comments
I feel your pain, but from an interesting spam source: When I'm interviewing for a story, I sometimes give out my "card," which is usually a piece of notebook paper torn from my notebook. This usually includes my e-mail, through which my source e-mails me public relations materials for the next six years.
Posted by: Amanda at August 10, 2007 12:47 PM
See if your ISP offers Baysean filtering. Works wonders -- I added SpamBayes to my MS Office mailbox at work, and recently SHU upgraded to a server that has Baysean filtering on the server.
You tell it what you think is spam and what is good, and before long the system starts to learn. Thus, if it notices that 99% of the time when I get a message for "casinos" I junk it, it will be more likely to junk it. You have to check every so often for the messages that the system can't decide about, but this stops almost all the spam from interrupting your day.
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz 
at August 10, 2007 8:24 PM
Ola! How art thou? Besides for the obvious and abject spam woes? Things moving along in Harrisburg I hope.
Just wanted to let you know that I'm back online, and this time I'm not lusting wander. At least not publicly. The title is Epiphanies. Hope to see you there!
Posted by: Neha at August 12, 2007 3:21 PM