Spam

What is Spam?

Spam is defined as the sending of unsolicited mails to large groups of people, in the case of the University, to large groups of University students and/or staff. Spam can have a detrimental effect on the University computer network and, in some cases, can prevent important emails from reaching the intended recipient.

 

Sending Spam

Sending Spam should be avoided at all times.

All Spam is dealt with very seriously by the University as it is in contravention of the University ICT Security Policy, Appendix C, Section 6

 

Alternatives to sending Spam

Buying, selling or swapping books
Use the ‘Booksmart’ service, available from Studentspace to advertise and find second hand books.

Finding accommodation
Use the University accommodation service to advertise a room or find a housemate.

Communicating with others on your module
You can still do this from within Studyspace. It is no longer possible to email whole modules in Outlook.

 

If you receive Spam

Please email abuse@kingston.ac.uk if you receive any spam from fellow staff or students in your University mailbox. Abuse of our email system is dealt with very seriously by the University.

 

Advice on how to avoid receiving Spam

Kingston University already uses a leading spam filtering service, but please bear in mind that it is never going to be possible to avoid all Spam. Your email address may be accessed via someone else's address book or from a group/chain email they have sent or from a forum/messageboard/website etc. . For the reasons mentioned above it is not possible to block spammers at source – they are both automated and ephemeral and, of course, anonymous - so taking care of your email address is the best defence in the battle against spam.

The following are good basic rules to avoid your email address getting onto spammers’ lists in the first place:

  • Never reply to spam, especially those emails offering "click here/go here/reply to.. if you do not want to recieve these messages in future" etc. This is an old established trick of making sure your address is live (and more valuable to sell).
  • Never give out your email address in order to download shareware or free programs. Very few things are truly free. It only takes a few minutes for a programmer to write a screensaver or weather program simply in order to collect live email addresses.
  • Always look for tick-boxes that allow you to opt out of newsletters, special offers etc. Be careful; many of these are worded to confuse you into opting in. A classic example is a famous media player download, for which the first 4 tick-boxes required a tick to opt out, whereas the second four had to be un-ticked to opt out. The smallprint was very small!
  • Do not publish your email address on any website unless absolutely necessary; particularly on message boards and forums. All of these are regularly scanned by software to search for and collect saleable email addresses.
  • Avoid out of office replies to external sources - these will also reply to spam (thus confirming a live email address)
  • Try to avoid getting on non-essential mailing lists, especially groups of friends emailing jokes etc. It only takes one of these people/messages to be accessed and your email address is on its way to the spammers.