Unsolicited bulk e-mail, commonly called "spam," is a problem for every electronic mail system on the Internet today. Drexel is no exception. This form of net abuse is known to virtually everyone who has ever had an e-mail account.
During 2002, in an effort to make the Drexel e-mail system more usable and to reduce the burden on the mail servers, Drexel implemented a policy for filtering spam. Spam filtering joins anti-virus filtering as another protection used to help keep email services running smoothly.
Drexel mail servers typically receive around 200,000 messages a day. The senders of these messages range from those of us in the University community, to companies and people around the world. Unfortunately, spam messages make up a growing portion of the load. When email-borne viruses are spreading, the percentage of "junk" is even higher.
It used to be that spammers only relayed their messages via misconfigured E-mail servers. Unfortunately, it is now possible to relay spam through other misconfigured applications, including web servers and proxy servers. As a result, in both 2001 and 2002 the volume of spam increased dramatically. For example, in 2002, there was a 400% increase in spam from March to July. The rate of increase has dropped since then, but through the end of 2003, the volume of spam was still steadily climbing. It is commonly estimated that spam on the internet is doubling every three or four months.
Over time, Drexel e-mail administrators have accumulated a list of spam sources. These are computers on the Internet, which have repeatedly sent large quantities of unsolicited mail to Drexel. The list of spam sources is divided into several parts: well-known spammers, open abusable servers/relays, and nuisances specific to Drexel.
The first group of spam sources includes those companies and individuals who have a track record of sending bulk mail to the internet. Our administrators use a combination of their experience and listings in a well-regarded list of known spam operators to determine what to block. Persistent, high volume spammers are blocked to prevent the resulting long mail delays and wasted storage, as well as to avoid the annoyance of many people having to delete unwanted mail in their inboxes.
In addition, Drexel rejects all mail from any system listed in a second, larger group of spam sources. These are computers which are open to abuse by spammers. Many computers are open to abuse out of ignorance; their owners simply don't realize that their machines are hackable. Others have already had their machines hacked specifically for the purpose of being used for spam. We use external lists of abusable machines to help determine which incoming mail should be blocked.
There are many reasons why a computer could be blocked. For instance, if the University is being flooded by messages in an attempted denial-of-service attack, the most effective response is to block the sending server.
The University's e-mail administrators make every effort to ensure that only those computers dedicated to generating spam are blocked. It is possible that a message, which is not spam, could be prevented from arriving into Drexel's e-mail servers by the block. The nature of Drexel's block list criteria makes it extremely unlikely that anything other than spam will be blocked. If you believe you have not received a desired message due to Drexel's spam blocking, please contact IRT at consult@drexel.edu.
Spam frequently contains offensive or annoying content. The University is not responsible for any inappropriate messages that may arrive in your electronic mailbox.
The University's anti-spam efforts are an attempt to ensure that e-mail remains an effective communication tool for the Drexel community. Drexel's Anti-Spam efforts are focused on the characteristics of message senders. In short, our software makes decisions based on the headers of messages.
Authorized messages sent by Drexel faculty, staff, and administration, to
Drexel mailing lists are not spam. Some Drexel mailing lists are updated
automatically and some are maintained manually. For more information on
Drexel mailing lists and the policies, please see these web pages:
Mass Email policy
Drexel Announcements list information: Unsubscribe
If you receive spam, you may choose to send it to IRT to help block spam from coming into the university. Your mail will be examined, analyzed, and the spam source will be blocked if it can be. However, please be aware that our postmaster and systems staff may not answer your spam complaint. Do not be concerned if you do not receive a reply from the Abuse Team. They did see your report and act on it. They were probably just very busy that day.
Please send examples of spam to spamreports@drexel.edu. When you send a spam complaint, it is imperative that you include the full internet headers with the spam. The Abuse Team cannot block any spam without the full headers; they are that important.
To get the full internet headers with Outlook or Outlook Express: Select the message in your inbox, right-click and take the bottom option (which will be "Options" or "Properties") then you should see internet headers. Select them all, copy them and paste them into your complaint.
To see the full internet headers in Drexel Webmail, just read the message, and while reading the message click on the little triangular arrow at the top of the message text all the way over on the right.
Here is a link that describes how to find the full headers for many e-mail clients. This link should show you how to see the full headers if you don't use Webmail or Outlook.
Never contact a spammer directly. The "remove" links in spam messages are usually simply verification routines that mark your e-mail address as a live person. Addresses of people who actually read spam are worth even more to spammers; don't give spammers a reason to move your name onto that "confirmed" list. Similarly, do not "reply" to the message. The spammer probably forged the "From" address anyway, so your reply will either be undeliverable, or go to someone who cannot help you.