According to Interim Director of Information Technology Tom Warger, spam, if opened, can cause computer problems, and its senders may intend to solicit personal information. However, the unpleasant results can only occur if spam e-mail is opened. "The way that spam works is that opening the e-mail activates it," he said. "That is how viruses are spread, and it is how you can be asked to give personal information."
Carter said that he believes that the incident which prompted last Tuesday's e-mail is the first of its kind at the College. However, Carter said that the potential for more cases like this exists, in part due to the clever strategies employed by spammers. "There is a lot of spam out there that looks like official mail," he said.
Carter advises that one should never respond to e-mails like the one received by the student who lost $1,000. "Obviously you should never give out your personal information," he said. "A bank or PayPal or eBay will never ask for your information in this way."
Carter emphasized that no legitimate enterprise would ask for the private, financial information that these suspect e-mails request. "These e-mails ask for information that you would provide to your bank, like name, date of birth, password protection and account information," he said.
The most effective strategy to combat these e-mail, according to Carter, is to delete them. "The best action to be defensive, delete the e-mails, don't open them and never save them," he said.
Warger suggests that having and using anti-spam software can reduce the number of spam e-mails one receives. "If you have anti-spam software and you run that, you do get less spam because some of the cookies that get planted on your computer get cleaned out that way," he said.
The number of spam e-mails one receives depends a lot on how often one uses the Internet and the types of Web sites one visits. "It depends on how many places you are leaving your name and e-mail," Warger said. "If you have your name out in different forums, you are more susceptible. If you do nothing on the Internet you get no spam. If you are out there in too many places in careless ways you get a lot of spam. Some people get over 100 spam e-mails per day while others are upset by receiving only two."
It is also possible that you receive spam because your computer is advertising. "If your computer is advertising your address everywhere you visit on the Internet then you are more susceptible," Warger said. He added that IT help desk employees can assist students and faculty members in changing computer settings to avoid such advertising.
The College has protections in place which help to reduce the incidents of spam. To avoid restricting access to educational information, however, the College's filtering system does not filter at maximum capacity. "The College has in places filters between the gateway to the College and the Internet," he said. "We catch a lot through that. We could catch a lot more, but we don't take the same approach to filtering as say a bank because this is an educational setting."
Further filtering could cause its own problems, such as false positives and censoring. "The filtering technologies are susceptible to false positives. Harvard [College] tried to e-mail all of their acceptances and the software thought that it was spam," Warger said. "There are human and intellectual reasons that we can't be more aggressive about fending off spam at the institutional level. People at insurance agencies won't have spam because they do a whole lot more censoring than people at the College would consider acceptable."
Warger said that, although it may be tempting, it is not wise to respond to a spam e-mail. "The thing not to do is to try to respond to it," he said. "What has happens is spammers capture those responses and then out of vindictiveness they circulate the e-mail addresses to other spammers."
Rather than responding to the e-mails, Warger suggests just deleting them or trying to get off the mailing list. "If the spam is from an unknown source, just delete it," he said. "If it is some place that you just ordered something from, there is a link to remove yourself from the e-mails."
Another possible strategy for combating spam is to have more than one e-mail account. "If you find that you are getting a lot of spam at your non-Amherst address, what you should do is get a new address," Warger said. "It takes quite a while for the spammers to catch up with you, especially if you save the address you are least able to change for more conservative uses, not forums and chat rooms."
While the problem of spam is a global phenomenon, with some estimates suggesting that 80 percent of global e-mail is spam, Warger said that the College is carefully monitoring and following the spam problem on the College's e-mail server. "We are watching and mulling over when does it make sense to come forward with a plan for this; I think there is a level of concern," he said. "We are looking more seriously at this now."
Students at the College have different reactions to spam, mostly based upon their different experiences with the problem. "I'm one of the lucky ones who doesn't get a lot of spam in her Amherst e-mail account," said Madeleine Levine '07. "I have friends who complain about it all the time though, but I get only one or two a day, tops, and I delete them."
Erin Murphy '05 has utilized one of the techniques Warger suggested. "If I receive spam in my mailbox, I usually delete it right away, but at times it builds up in my mailbox," she said. "I have opened up a Gmail account in the hopes of avoiding some of the spam e-mails, but inevitably it can't be avoided."
Jonah Shepp '08 said spam was annoying but not aggravating. "Spam is a major nuisance ... but at the same time it's easier to avoid, so long as you don't throw your e-mail address around too much, so among the perils of society today, it's pretty low on my list," he said.