Tips on how to can e-mail spam
Vanderbilt University Medical Center is currently receiving 55,000 pieces of junk e-mail, known as spam, each day.
“Spam is a problem everywhere, not just at Vanderbilt. All industries have seen a dramatic increase in spam,” said Steve Price, supervisor of collaborative messaging services, part of network computing services. “Each user needs to understand how his or her e-mail address might be used, and be cautious about providing it, particularly to an unfamiliar Web site.”
Price offers these suggestions on reducing spam in your Vanderbilt e-mail inbox:
• If you don’t recognize the sender of an e-mail, don’t open it. Instead, delete it.
• Never respond to spam e-mail to get your name removed from the list. This verifies for the spammer that they have a legitimate e-mail address, often resulting in more spam.
• Don’t your use Vanderbilt e-mail address when you are required to provide an e-mail address to sign up for anything on the Internet, and don’t provide your work e-mail address when conducting personal business. Companies often sell e-mail addresses to spammers. Create and use a separate, personal e-mail account through free services like Hotmail or Yahoo.
• Nearly 50 percent of the spam destined for VUMC is sent to the old @mcmail address. Retire your @mcmail address by e-mailing retire.mcmail@vanderbilt.edu.
• VUMC’s e-mail spam filtering service is available at https://email.mc.vanderbilt.edu/ContentFilter/CF/Welcome.asp.