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Junk Email General Advice

Definition of Junk Mail

It is difficult to define junk mail, but the following is generally accepted

• Unwanted mail which has been addressed unsolicited to a very large number of recipients.
• Mail whose content may be offensive.
• Mail whose source has been concealed.

I would add a further category to this list

• Junk mail recirculated to other mailing lists with comments such as "did anyone else get this" added to the message.

Another commonly used term for junk mail is spam, but if you use this term it is worth being aware of the position of Hormel Foods Corporation who produce luncheon meat under the brand name of SPAM. See www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm.

Recommended Action

Information Services is taking various steps to block junk email where possible. However it is inevitable that some junk email will not be stopped by these blocks because the population of junk mailers and the routing of junk email is prone to rapid change.

In general, if you do receive any junk email, Information Services recommends recommends that you delete it. This action is simple and fast. It is not necessary to report every single piece of junk mail to Information Services, as we are aware of most of it anyway; if we can take any effective action we will, but in many cases it is not possible to take any action other than reporting it to UKERNA when appropriate.

In serious cases, for example if it is offensive and contains or appears to be offering illegal material (eg. indecent pictures of children), and you suspect that it has not already been reported, please do not hesitate to report the incident to the IT Service Desk (ext. 7171, email: Helpdesk@bham.ac.uk ).

What not to do

It is advisable not to reply to the message or to attempt to follow up an offer to remove yourself from the mailing list for three main reasons.

• The majority of return email addresses do not work and your reply will wait in a queue until either
  • it times out
  • an error message is returned
  • we delete them if an excessive number are stuck and are causing problems
• The apparent sender or reply address is almost never the true sender so you could be sending your reply to an innocent party.
• It has been claimed that some junk mail list owners use the fact that you have replied to mark the address as active and re-use it in other lists.

For similar reasons, do not be tempted to "mailbomb" the sender by sending a large number of files or a large amount of data to them. Furthermore, mailbombing could contravene the General Conditions of use of Computing Facilities as it is arguably an inappropriate use of resources.

We would also discourage use of packages such as "Spamhater" without exercising extreme caution. and checking every message that they generate before sending. Such programs often use the To: and From: fields in the header and generate multiple complaints to the sites concerned. Use of these fields alone is an unreliable method of determining an appropriate target for complaints as they often contain addresses of innocent third parties. Note that To: and From: fields seen in the mail header of any mail message do not have to bear any relationship to the sender or the recipient.

Other packages which take inappropriate action are also to be discouraged. Some packages even send out an advert for the package for each piece of email received. A growing number of sites are beginning to treat such inappropriate action as "second generation" junk email and acting on such misuse.

If you do complain about a piece of email, please do not send it to an excessive number of recipients. Multiple copies of a complaint to the same organisation should be avoided where possible.

Last Updated 04 Feb 2002. Please mail any comments to C.B.Bayliss@bham.ac.uk