A few weeks ago these lists suffered from an out-break of unwanted
and sometimes offensive messages;  commonly called Spam.  At the
time tempers were running short and people were either deleting
unread anything to do with this topic or sending messages saying
"stop this" (usually in capitals) so I have delayed sending round a
note setting out some of the things that happen and some
suggestions for dealing with them.

This Friday afternoon seems a good time to produce such a note.
For those who are comfortable that they know what to do about
Spam (and virus warnings) please delete this message now.

======================================
What is Spam?

Unwanted email, typically unsolicited and off-topic advertising to lists
such as these.  Or sent to you individually because people sell email
lists and you have got onto one of these.

Or sometimes hate mail or offensive diatribes (better not give any
examples of subjects: I might pick your favourite hobbyhorse).

=======================================
What can I do about it?

Not much in truth.  List owners and those people who run our email
services and the Mailbase service can do lots and are doing so
behind the scenes.  When they are sucessful, of course, we don't
know because they are sucessful!

Best advice is just delete it.

NEVER reply especially to messages inviting you to do so with the
word REMOVE (or similar).  For, guess what, such messages are
just the indication to the pondlife that do this sort of thing that the
email address they had was a real one.

Please, please don't complain to the list, don't forward the message
to other lists saying "have you seen this" and, most-of-all,

DO NOT hit the reply button to send them a Remove indication and
send that message to this list.  Think about it for a minute.

Someone sends a message to the list.

The list mailer at Mailbase takes that message and sends it to all
(several hundred?) of us.

In the Reply-to field of most lists is the listname.

If you hit Reply to on your mailer and don't then check where the
mailer is sending it and then send your remove message to the list, it
ends up going round to us all again.  You can see that madness lies
down that route.

============================================
Say NO to spam - just delete it
============================================


Ok that is the end of a Friday afternoon rant.

Here are some references which provide more information and
advice on this problem  (and also about the fake virus warnings
which can have a similar effect on list traffic and people's tempers.)

==============================================
Mailbase advice and some more information at:

http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/docs/junk.html

==============================================
Virus warnings

All messages warning about emails being viruses are hoaxes and
must not be re-sent to others as this waste of resource is itself the
malign effect which the originators (not the innocent re-senders, of
course) are seeking.  Email as such cannot cause harmful effects
by being read.

(Since I wrote this a few weeks ago, the technically well connected
amoung you will know that recent developments have revealed a
snag in various versions of Microsoft Outlook which make that
statement less true than it once was.  But it is still a good rule of
thumb. See:

http://www.eu.microsoft.com/security/bulletins/ms98-008.htm  )

Enclosures to emails are a different matter.  Many of the virus
attacks which we currently suffer come with documents attached to
email.  Most organisations such as ours have powerful virus
protection installed on the servers which support your email and
document storage generally.  Generally also on the
PCs/workstations which we use.

For more information and links see:

http://www.eu.microsoft.com/BillGates/BillGates_L/COLUMN/1998Ess
ay/3-25col.htm

http://kumite.com/myths/

http://isg.bham.ac.uk/isgPublications/isbulletin/february97/feb97p17.
htm

(These URLs should each be all on one line only, but my mailer
splits the long line.)

Regards

Jim Whitaker
(List owner admin-ucas, admin-student)
================================









*****************************************************************
* J.S.M. Whitaker                  [log in to unmask]
* IT Support Manager
* Academic Office                  Tel: 0121-414 3811
*                            (Secretary 0121-414 3812)
* The University of Birmingham     Fax: 0121-414 6864
* Edgbaston
* Birmingham      B15 2TT
*****************************************************************


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%