Little-used Service Can Squash Your Spam
By Alex Cabe

Most Carolina students know what it’s like to look for an important message and find their e-mail boxes choked with unwanted advertisements or outright swindles. The University can help. It has offered a spam filter for years, but most students don’t even know it’s there.

There are more than a thousand things that can tell the filter that a message might be spam, said messaging system manager Chris Colomb. “If it[the message] has all caps, for example,” Colomb said. “[Or] if it uses a predominance of certain words, say, to make certain parts of your body larger.”

After the system filters remove spam, there are several things they can do with it. “Then they can decide what they want to do with the messages,” Colomb said. “They can just delete them all with a couple clicks of the mouse.”

The filter also has a blacklist feature. You can stop certain addresses, or whole service providers, from sending you messages ever again. The system is up to 98 percent effective.

Sophomore Raphael Ruiz started using the filter a week ago.

“I suggested it to a couple of my friends who didn’t know anything about it, and they were really surprised that we had one on campus,” Ruiz said.

Colomb said the University is trying to do more to get the word out about the filters.

Another way to prevent spam is to disguise your e-mail address when you post it on a Web site.

You can get instructions to sign up for the filters at
http://help.unc.edu/?id=5469&within=search--1437463209

You can learn how to disguise your e-mail address at http://help.unc.edu/?id=5369&within=search--489726449