Junk Mail -- otherwise known as "bulk e-mail" or "SPAM" is referred to as any e-mail that is an unsolicited bulk message. Its purpose is usually to advertise a product, web site, or company.
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Recently there has been a fast increase in spam around the world. 80%-85% of world wide emails are spam. Spam is getting harder to detect due to the massive amount of "Zombie Servers". A "Zombie Server" is a regular computer that has been infected by spam and is now used to create and send spam to others. Spam now also uses randomly generated subjects with conversational style messages. If we were to block those, then all emails would be blocked. All these factors make it hard to prevent all spam from entering your mailbox. Sometimes a malicious spammer or infected computer can send messages spoofing the address as-if it were from @byui.edu. Messages like this might bounce back to a student or faculty member making it look like THEY were the ones sending out spam. This is common, and though we do the best we can to block such emails, some will continue to get through.
What does BYUI do to keep you free from Junk Mail?
All mail destined for an @byui.edu uses at least one powerful Spam Filtering Service. Before email enters our internal network, it is filtered first by ProofPoint spam engine. As of the date of this writing, more than 12 million messages attempt to be delivered to BYU-Idaho every month, but only around 62 thousand of those are legitimate mail that eventually end up in the Inbox of a student or employee. If you receive an e-mail in your mailbox that should have been flagged as Junk Mail, please report it so that we may block future copies of the same email.
Student email is provided by Microsoft's "Outlook Live" service which, in addition to ProofPoint, also leverages Hotmail's powerful spam filter. If students desire to bypass this second layer of protection, they can log into their student email and disable Junk Mail Filtering from the options menu.
Employees have the added safety of Junk Mail settings in Microsoft Outlook. Microsoft provides pre-defined rules in their Desktop version of Outlook, which can sometimes be even over-zealous in filtering business-related mail into a Junk Mail folder. From the tools menu, select "Options" and click the Junk E-mail button under the Preferences tab to modify your Junk Mail folder settings.
Even the best spam filter lets a few SPAM emails slip through the cracks. At this point it's up to the users to help make the filter even stronger.
What can you do as a user if you are getting spam or other unwanted emails?
