Although originally referring to a brand of canned meat by-product, spam is now used widely in the computing world to refer to the unwanted junk mail that appears in people's email inboxes, often in huge quantities.

It is true that BYU's email system does automatically filter spam. However, the ECEn email accounts are completely independent and the filtering done by BYU's email system doesn't apply to ECEn email addresses.

The only way to prevent people from sending you spam is to prevent them from obtaining your email address. Since Spam marketers are so good at finding published email addresses and guessing or generating unpublished ones, completely preventing spam from being sent to you is not a practical solution.

Although you probably won't have much success in preventing spam from being sent, you can keep it out of your mailbox by using a spam filter. Spam filters are programs that look at your email and analyze whether it is normal legitimate email or mass-mailed spam. Anything detected to be spam is either deleted or moved to a special folder.

The biggest problem with spam filters is that they will occasionally classify a legitimate email as spam. This means that in some instances, you run the risk of missing an important email that never made it to your mailbox. For this reason, it is generally a good idea to have all spam moved to a special folder instead of automatically deleting it. That way, you can occasionally check the folder for legitimate emails and make sure that only true spam gets deleted.

Since you will occasionally receive legitimate email that is mistakenly identified as spam, having the spam filter delete everything automatically is generally a bad idea. Once email is deleted, it is gone forever. By putting all suspect email in a special folder, you reserve the power to recover any email that was erroneously labeled as spam. It is good practice to occasionally clean this folder, checking for legitimate messages and deleting everything else to save space.

No filter is perfect, and there will always be some cleverly crafted spam that makes it to your inbox. Delete it and move on.

Contact the ECEn SysOps. They can make sure that email from that address is accepted in the future.

The answer is almost always no. Legitimate institutions will never ask for personal information via email, and clicking on links provided in email can also be dangerous. Spammers often create counterfeit links that claim to go to one webpage but actually take you to another. If you are at all unsure about the trustworthiness of an email, err on the side of caution: don't reply to it, open its attachments, or visit its links. Feel free to contact the ECEn SysOps if you have any concerns about email messages you receive.

No. Bogus virus alerts are a common form of email spam. If your computer really is infected, you won't be notified by email. Hopefully, you have an anti-virus program installed that will let you know about legitimate problems. Be sure to keep it up to date! If you are using the version of Symantec Antivirus provided through BYU, refer to "Scheduling Automatic Updates with Symantec Antivirus." And once again, always feel free to ask the SysOps.