Avoiding Junk E-mail

During the last few years, junk e-mail (also known as spam) has become an increasing problem for many computer users. You can minimize the amount of junk mail you receive by following some simple rules.

1. Be carefull to whom and where you submit your e-mail address. If you have to submit some e-mail address and you are uncertain if it is safe, consider getting a temporary e-mail address from a service provider, which offers free e-mail addresses (such as luukku.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com etc)

2. Do not reply to junk e-mail. If you do, you wil confirm the validity of the address to the spammer and receive even more junk mail in the future.

3. Do not publish your e-mail address as such on public web pages or news groups. Agent programs scan through these forums to gather e-mail addresses. Use an altered address with instructions how to make it work, for instance firstname.lastname@domain.NOSPAM.fi.invalid (Please remove the words .NOSPAM and .invalid).

4. It may not be necessary to publish e-mail addresses on web pages at all. Instead, if firstname.lastname aliases are used, visitors of your web site can be informed that an e-mail address can be formed from a person´s name as follows: firstname.lastname@domain.fi. The personnel of the University of Lapland have such alias names in the ulapland.fi domain. Please notice that there may be some exceptions due to identical names.

5. If you do group postings, add only yourself to To:field and all other addressees to the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) field. This way you transmit only your own e-mail address to each addressee. Do not forget to add yourself to the To:field - if the To:field is left blank, junk mail filters may block your message.

6.Use such e-mail software, which enables the use of digital signatures. By using your digital signature you can identify yourself reliably to the recipient.

7. If you receive junk e-mail in such quantities that it prohibits you from using the e-mail, please contact the ICT Services.

The University of Lapland does filter out junk mail on e-mail servers. You can also yourself create rules to filter out junk mail in your e-mail program, so that unwanted e-mail does not arrive in your in-box. Please see the users´s guide of the e-mail program for further instructions.