Are you receiving solicitations, pornography, or any other kind of junk email? Do people you don’t know send you personal messages, strange attachments, or blank emails with no text? Are unwanted advertisements filling up your inbox?
If your answer is yes, then this is why:
Your email address has been shared or discovered. You or someone who knows your email has given it away. You may have done this without even thinking about it. Think real hard and answer these questions:
· Have you ever created a logon account on a website?
· Have you ever used your email address to access a website or filled out a form on a website and given them your email address?
· Have you ever filled out a paper form at a doctor’s office, retail store, credit application, or any other purpose that asked for your email account?
· Have you shared it with your mortgage company, credit card company, or a grocery store as part of a “preferred customer” card program?
· Have you given your account information out to a telemarketer or over the phone to anyone?
· Have you ever tried to remove yourself from a mailing list by following the instructions on an email message?
If you answered yes to any of these questions or think possibly someone else who knows your email account information has done any of the above, then you are at risk. Nobody really knows why but the common name for junk email is SPAM. Once you are a victim of SPAM, it is difficult to stop it. There are ways of stopping some SPAM from entering our email system, but most methods are not proven and none of them will stop all junk messages.
Email addresses can also be discovered by junk email senders. They will send emails to randomly generated addresses. Email users with common names such as Smith or Jones are at the greatest risk because their email addresses are easier to figure out.
Strange
or Blank emails
Strange or blank emails coming from individuals may be caused by a computer virus. If you receive and email that makes no sense, has an attachment that you were not expecting, or is just a blank message, DELETE it. It was most likely caused by a computer virus. Your computer is probably not infected but some computer somewhere on our network is infected and it tried to infect your computer by sending you an infected email.
Additionally, employees are prohibited from sending chain letters, junk email, or any other kind of personal message using our email system. See the other links on the Policy and Information page for additional information.
What can you do about it?
Can you stop these emails? The short answer is no. Once your email address has been shared and abused, there is no stopping the flood of junk you will receive. The only thing you can do is ask your technical person to change your user ID and email address. For example, if your name is Angela Sue Jones and your user ID is “JonesA”, you can ask to have your middle initial added and make it “JonesAS” or ask for a number to be added to the end like “JonesA1”. Making this change can adjust your email address enough to stop the unwanted messages. HOWEVER, this will also prevent you from receiving legitimate emails until you notify everyone of your new email address. This ONLY affects emails sent to you by people outside of the school system.
Can the email system filter your messages and prevent
junk email?
There are many ways for the email system to filter messages and stop junk email. The problem is that none of them are perfect. They will prevent most junk email, but not all of it. They will also randomly prevent you from receiving legitimate messages. Setting up email filtering will cut down on junk email problems, but at the same time will create problems and questions about why legitimate email is not being received. We currently use a filtering system but it will never be able to stop all junk emails.