As you’ve probably noticed from your own mailbox, we have seen a sharp increase in the amount of spam email being received by Davidson College. In a recent 15-day time span over 1 million spam messages were diverted by our email servers before they were delivered to individual mailboxes. But the spammers are clever. They work to alter their messages to circumvent the multi-layered protection we have in place to thwart them.

ITS uses a combination of anti-spam defenses including software on our email gateway servers (PureMessage with Internet Mail Filtering enabled). While every effort is made to catch as much spam as possible, not all spam will be caught. To combat spam that makes it through PureMessage, you can help by using the junk e-mail filters available in Outlook 2003, Outlook Web Access (OWA), and Entourage. Office 2003 users have this option turned on by default. By default, it is set to "low," but if you continue to get a lot of spam in your inbox, the filter can be set higher. (Actions / Junk E-mail / Junk E-Mail Options.) You can customize the junk filter for your particular email as well; for more information, search Outlook's Help for "junk e-mail filter." To quickly add a name to the blocked senders list, right-click the junk e-mail message, and click Add Sender to Blocked Senders List from the shortcut menu.

Entourage, Office 2000, and OWA users will need to turn on this filter via OWA by following the steps outlined on this Web page.

ITS continually evaluates how we can improve our anti-spam efforts. Be sure to read the Security Suggestions for more information.