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Spam and Junk Mail

Unsolicited bulk email, commonly called spam or junk mail is a problem for every email system. It is commonly estimated that the amount of spam is doubling every three or four months.

ITR utilizes a number of server-based spam defenses to block and filter the majority of spam sent to Cabrini emails. These defenses include blocking lists, regularly updated lists of computers and servers that are either known spam sources or known to be vulnerable to spam operations.

Spam not blocked by the lists will hit our second line of defense, the spam filter system, which evaluates each email item individually from a long list of possible spam indicators in both the email headers and the contents.

Keep your email address off the spam radar:

  • Don’t post your address on a publicly searchable web page if you can avoid it (Departments can use functional, rather than personal addresses).
  • Only give out your email address to reputable organizations with good privacy policies (Yes, you should read the privacy policies).
  • For all other sites, if you must give out an email address, use one you don’t care about (a free one from a service like hotmail for example).
  • Don’t ever reply to spam or use the option to unsubscribe. That just tells the spammer they have found a real person willing to read what they are sending.

Protect your PC from viruses and malware:

  • Spammers want to infect your PC so they can get all of the email addresses in your address book and so they can use your PC as a “zombie” to send out more spam.
  • By following good security practices, you are protecting your friends and your community as well as yourself.

Report untagged spam:

  • We encourage our users to send any missed spam messages to our help queue to improve filtering rules.
  • Send the offending email with full mail headers to itrhelp@cabrini.edu.

Block automatic display of images:

  • Unwanted, disturbing images are a particularly upsetting aspect of spam.
  • Automatically loading images can also trigger malicious software.
  • Your main defense is to only open email from recognized sources. If, however, you need to open emails from people you don't know, then you need the additional capabilities that desktop email programs offer.
  • Many email programs, such as Outlook, offer the ability to turn off automatic image display and/or automatic loading of remote images.

Tagged spam (subject starting with [SPAM:XXXXXXX] should always go straight to the Junk Email folder. We've seen some cases in Outlook where this is not happening automatically.

  • To solve this problem, please email us at itrhelp@cabrini.edu to receive instructions for creating a rule.

Emails incorrectly marked as spam or sent to the Junk folder:

  • Occasionally, a non-spam item is falsely tagged and filtered into the Junk Email folder.
  • We strongly recommend you check this folder at least once every 28 days, so that you can catch and rescue any such error.
  • Please also send the incorrectly tagged email (with full mail headers) to itrhelp@cabrini.edu, so we can try to prevent the problem in the future.

Emails rejected as spam:

  • Occasionally, outside companies get too aggressive in their spam blocking lists and reject mail from perfectly fine servers such as ours.
  • If this happens to you, ask the intended recipient to notify their service of the problem and take our server off their blacklist.