Spam Guidelines

What is spam?

In its simplest form, spam means any unsolicited email that arrives in your Inbox. It is the electronic form of "Junk Mail" that you receive in your home letterbox on a daily basis.

Virtually everyone with an email address is susceptible to spam. Unscrupulous individuals use a variety of methods to obtain other people's email addresses and use this information to "bombard" any number of recipients with unwanted correspondence. Common examples of spam content include chain letters, pornography, commercial advertisement and virus attachments.

It is impossible to stop spam altogether without blocking out countless legitimate emails in the process. For this reason, a lot of mail has to be given the benefit of the doubt. The University of Waikato does, however, do as much as it can to reduce the number of unsolicited, sometimes offensive, but nearly always irritating, emails reaching its users.

Google Apps spam and junk email is now managed using the functionality within the Google Mail application itself. Spam and junk email will show as unread mail in your Spam (Gmail) or Junk E-mail (Outlook) folder in your email client.

Email Incorrectly Marked as Spam or Missed Spam

In the unlikely event of email addressed to you being falsely identified as spam, you can whitelist the sender by following the instructions listed here.

Unfortunately some spam emails will still get through. You can blacklist those senders by following instructions listed here.

What else can be done?

In addition to the measures taken by the University to prevent spam, there are steps that each user can take to reduce the problem still further. Here are a few 'spam-fighting' tips:

Use your mail handler to manage junk emails. For example, Microsoft Outlook has functionality that enables the user to add senders, or even whole domains, to a junk email list. Users may also create rules that can recognise spam, such as a rule that flags, deletes or moves to another folder email messages that contain certain words or phrases. Please contact your Computer Support Person for further assistance.

Do not reply to the sender. Often, junk email invites the user to remove themselves from the mailing list to prevent receipt of future send outs. Although this seems to be the logical thing to do, all it serves to do is to authenticate your email address.  Anecdotal evidence suggests that the user will in fact receive more, not less, spam as a result of using these opt-out tools.

Avoid posting your address on web sites. With regard to spam, the fewer people that know about your address, the better. It is advisable to use one email account which is restricted for personal or business use and another 'disposable' one, like a hotmail address, for sharing in the public domain (e.g. when registering on web sites).

Never forward junk email. Spam content can often be offensive, misleading, annoying and even illegal. Do not add to the problem by subjecting other users to this type of mail.

Complain to the service provider. Most well-known service providers have procedures in place to deal with spam originating from one of their accounts. For example, Hotmail invites the user to report the problem by forwarding a complete copy of the message, including the full message headers to [email protected].