The amount of spam in Ball State University e-mail boxes is increasing, but students will have to make changes to stop it.
E-mail at Ball State increased 79 percent from 2004 to 2006. However, spam has increased 616 percent between those two years, according to numbers from University Computing Services.
Spam is increasing because e-mail is becoming a more popular way for people to communicate with each other, David Powell, lead system manager and security engineer for UCS, said.
"Everyone has e-mail these days - from me, to my 5-year-old daughter," he said.
UCS typically looks at statistics on one of four servers it uses to control in-bound e-mails. During the past 18 days, nearly two million messages have come in, but more than a quarter of them were never delivered-ábecause they originated from known spammers, Loren Malm, assistant director of security policy systems and assessment, said.
On all four servers, as many as two million spam attempts could have been made, Malm said. According to the UCS Web site, spam messages still get through because spam is often sent from legitimate e-mail systems, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or Google.
UCS is aware spam is a large issue at Ball State and is taking measures to stop it, he said.
Ball State subscribes to the Real Black Hole List, he said, which is a list of known companies that send spam. With this list, the university stops incoming e-mails from those addresses.
This is more effective than checking the actual content of the e-mail and then blocking it based on the content, he said, and stopping legitimate e-mails is the last thing the school wants to do.
Students can block additional spam by going to their Microsoft Outlook e-mail accounts, selecting 'options' and determining the type of e-mail they-áwould like to receive, Malm said.
They can stop specific spam by blocking all mail with a certain subject name. An example listed on the UCS Web site is blocking an e-mail with "Make Money Fast" as the subject.
The Web site also recommends students use separate e-mail accounts - a university-given e-mail address and a private account.
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