DEALING WITH SPAM!
Email systems struggle with how to allow the email you want to receive through while keeping out the email you do not want. While we try to identify some email spamming sources and filter them out, new sources emerge rapidly. We also cannot always be sure that everyone wants to exclude the same messages. Terms used to exclude some spam may also exclude someone's requested health information. With thousands of accounts, we cannot be certain we are acting in everyone's best interest (even if we had time to try to code all the rules!). So, how can you avoid all of the unwanted messages?
Be careful how and when you use your Greensboro College email address. Get yourself some other free account (like HotMail or YahooMail) to use when you download free games, log on to recreational websites, or purchase things online.
Use the email rules or filtering features of PrideMail or the email client you use to read and send mail. Help in PrideMail for setting Rules is at: http://pridemail.gborocollege.edu/Guide/Rules.html. An example rule you may wish to configure is to filter out all emails with a subject line containing "[SPAM]". Emails with a subject line starting with "[SPAM]" have been recognized by our fiters as possible spam. If you have these messages automatically placed in a Junk Mail folder, or a Trash folder, and a message is incorrectly marked as "[SPAM]" then you will know where to look if an expected message does not appear to have arrived. Messages that are incorrectly marked as "[SPAM]" can be forwarded to the Information Technology department so that we can make adjustments to our filters.
If you have trouble filtering out the mail you do not want, maybe you can write rules that will act on the email you do want. For instance, a rule for when the From line contains gborocollege.edu could automatically place the emails from gborocollege.edu addresses into a folder you have set up called gcemail. All other email would continue to go into your inbox. You can have numerous rules and you can assign priorities to them.
Another option for dealing with spam is to use an email client that has spam filtering capabilities. Email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook have adaptive filters that you can train to identify junk email. While these are excellent options, you also have to be careful which messages you mark as spam. If you mark several messages from gborocollege.edu addresses as spam the filters may think that messages from any gborocollege.edu account is spam and begin placing it into the junk folder. For more information on email clients go to http://infotech.gborocollege.edu/basics_pridemail_basics.php
