With the widespread use of both personal and course-related e-mail at the University came the responsibility of controlling "spam," the Internet moniker for junk mail. The University is combating spam and other abuse of electronic communication through new regulations, a responsible computing campaign and an abuse response team.
Problems created by spam can be simply annoying, or in the case of mass mailings, they can cause actual strain on mail servers that prevent users from accessing their regular e-mail.
An e-mail message was sent from the Health and Science Center to a large number of people Sept. 3. Its large size and the way the recipients were listed in the header slowed down University e-mail servers.
"A Medical Center worker, in good faith without understanding, mailed a large message to numerous people," said Robert "Chip" German, ITC director of policy and planning.
Like other Internet hoaxes, the unwelcomed message claimed that a large organization would donate money to a cancer research fund for every copy of the e-mail sent.
When Health and Science Center employees returned to work after the weekend, some who received the message recognized it for the hoax it was while others did not. A large number of reply-to-all messages resulted from the recipients and tied up the server.
"People who received the message used the reply-to-all function of their mail programs and the situation cascaded into a large problem," German said.
ITC estimated that as many as 2,000 of the large e-mails were sent and replied to and noted that hundreds of calls were fielded by the ITC Computing Help Desk. "People could not access their accounts from off-Grounds because the header size was too big for their mail programs to read in," ITC Computing Helpdesk Director George Payne said. "One person claimed to have a mail download size of nine megabytes," he said.
Although ITC does not monitor messages in transit out of privacy concerns, situations like this mass e-mail occasionally surface when servers slow down and the help desk gets bogged down with phone calls.
"I can't remember a case when it happened just the same way, but we do hear about similar things when people don't understand [ITC] policy or implications," German said.
In 1998 ITC revised its Handbook on Responsible Computing - which all first-year students are encouraged to read to get their computing accounts - to include regulations on mass mailing. This mandated all mailings to 400 or more recipients to get ITC permission before being sent out. ITC also defines chain mail as "any message that is unrelated to the mission of the University that has been forwarded more than 10 times," specifying that repeat offenders will have their e-mail privileges suspended.
Some of the more annoying problems occur on many of the University's e-mail "lists". Lists can be moderated and unmoderated. Membership commonly ranges from 10 to more than 100 people.
"I think [the misuse of the list] has had an adverse effect on the club since it will be a lot harder to get [information] to everyone without people being on the list," said Robert Collins, fourth-year College student and Cavalier Road Runners list owner.
While there are occasional problems with almost every e-mail list, they are outweighed by the convenience of being able to send information with specific groups of people.
Almost everyone who is on an e-mail list is likely to get a spam message at some time and German recommends that people "simply delete the message and don't pursue it further because you will probably end up adding to the problem."
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