Each year around April 15, August 15, and November 15-January 15, Rice email accounts experience a peak in phishing. Phishing messages attempt to steal personal information like passwords and financial data. As the 2014 IRS annual tax filing deadline approaches, remember that up to 90% of the mail sent to your rice.edu address is phishing or spam.
Rice IT utilizes several tools and applications to reduce and manage spam sent to rice.edu email addresses. Blacklists are used to prevent spam from entering the Rice email system. Spam Assassin tags suspicious messages in the subject line, creating an easy, visual identifier for likely junk mail in an email inbox. DSPAM is an individual filtering tool that can identify likely spam messages and either tag them or hold them in a quarantine area for recipients to view later. Email filters can also be applied at the local desktop level by individuals.
Spam = junk mail
Spam is junk email. Like unwanted advertisements or announcements that arrive in postal mail, these unsolicited messages clog delivery systems and increase the number of messages a recipient must sort through in order to find legitimate mail.
Phishing = email fraud
Rice email servers process over a million email messages per day. Between 80% and 90% of that email can be defined as spam or phishing (electronic scams or fraud). Email scams, commonly called phishing, attempt to elicit personal identity information or money from the recipient. The sender usually poses as a legitimate-sounding business or organization representative, such as the Help Desk at Rice, or Chase Bank. They may threaten to close the recipient’s account if the reader does not verify their account or respond in some other way.
Train DSPAM to recognize spam and phishing
DSPAM is an optional spam identification and quarantine or tagging tool. You can use it three different ways: quarantine, tag, or deliver messages.
- Quarantine suspicious messages – The spam identification tool does not have the capability to prevent delivery of messages to your Rice email account, but it CAN divert many suspicious messages into a quarantine area. You just need to remember to review the quarantine queue at least once each week to train the tool to recognize more legitimate messages.
- Tag suspicious messages and deliver them to your inbox – Use this feature to send all messages to your inbox, but tag suspicious messages as a prefix to their subject lines. These messages will have a subject line that begins with ***SPAM***.
- Deliver the message as usual but include the X-DSPAM-Result header – All messages are delivered to your inbox as usual. Suspicious messages will include a special X-DSPAM-Result header.
Instructions for setting up and training DSPAM are found in the Do-It-Yourself pages in docs.rice.edu. If you are ready to review messages in your quarantine queue, log into DSPAM now.
If spam remains a nuisance, contact the Help Desk (713.348.4357 or helpdesk@rice.edu) for assistance in tuning DSPAM or other filters to more aggressively tag or quarantine suspicious messages.