Harvard Divinity School

Information Technology and Media Services

What Is Spam?

Spam, as it is commonly referred to in Internet parlance, actually refers to a host of unwelcome intrusions into your electronic inbox (and has nothing to do with a certain famous meat product). Spam is not unlike the junk mail that you may receive at your place of work or at home. However, electronic junk email is all the more insidious because those who send such junk email do not have to pay postage, nor answer for the content of their junk email.

Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE for short) is the type of Spam most users encounter. UCE is a leading complaint of Internet users. Still, junk email is more than a nuisance; it also costs Internet users and businesses a great deal of money. There is a sense in which junk email is "postage due" marketing; it's like a telemarketer calling you collect. The economics of junk email encourages massive abuse and because junk emailers can get into the business very cheaply, the volume of junk email is increasing every day. And again, as these junk email senders are mostly anonymous profiteers, the contents of their junk email are not regulated. Hence you may receive such emails relating to:

• Chain letters
• Pyramid schemes (including Multilevel Marketing, or MLM)
• Other "Get Rich Quick" or "Make Money Fast" (MMF) schemes
• Offers of phone sex lines and ads for pornographic web sites
• Offers of software for collecting email addresses and sending UCE
• Offers of bulk emailing services for sending UCE
• Stock offerings for unknown start-up corporations
• Quack health products and remedies
• Illegally pirated software ("Warez")

It is important to realize that the content of the junk email you receive has nothing to do with you personally, and you are not being "targeted" on any personal level. As upsetting as it may be to receive some of these highly objectionable materials, it is important to know that nothing you did likely made you a target for such junk email.

What can you do?

Unfortunately, there aren't many complete solutions to handling junk email. The Office of Information Technology & Media Services has made our email server as "spammer-proof" as possible, meaning that junk email senders cannot use our server to send junk email to HDS users, or anyone else for that matter. However, junk email senders can still easily find other servers outside of Harvard to use for sending their junk email to our users.

Safe anti-spam practices

1. Don't give out your email address to businesses or organizations unless it is absolutely required.

2. Some people who do a lot of shopping and communicating on the internet find it helpful to have two email addresses: one private, personal address, and another that they can use for registering for online discussions, placing orders and the like.

3. Be careful about asking to be removed from a list! Unless the sender is a reputable business (such as someone you bought CDs from recently, or any other clearly legitimate business), replying to the message will only confirm that your address is live, and that you pay attention to spam. A professional spammer will either use your address to send you more email or sell your mailing address to another spammer. In either case, you'll get more junk email.

4. If you are feeling vigilant, you can forward a copy of your junk email, with full headers intact, to the postmaster at the sender's domain. Include a friendly note of explanation. 9 times out of 10, the admin for an email server can be reached at postmaster@[whatever mail host]. See the very end of this document for instruction on how to view the full header of an email message using Microsoft Outlook.

For more information about Spam, see this technical FAQ.

How to view the full header of an email in Microsoft Outlook (version 97, 98, 2000, 2002).

1. Open the mail message.

2. In Outlook 98, 2000, and 2002, from the View menu, select Options.

   In Outlook 97, at the top of the message, click the Options tab.

3. The message headers are at the bottom of the window, and are labeled Headers: or Internet headers:

4. Cut and paste the headers from that display and send them on to the postmaster.

If you have additional questions, please don't hesitate to contact us.

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