Spam e-mails

E-mails do not cost postage. This leads to an unsightly problem:

It’s easy to send thousands of emails. This is exploited by companies to send promotional emails that take up precious resources and fill up your inbox. These promotional emails are also known as spam emails, “spam” for short, or junk emails.

Approximately 60% of email received today is spam. At many universities, e-mail is automatically checked centrally when it arrives. Obvious spam e-mails are then marked accordingly or automatically deleted.

Attention

Here’s how to behave properly:

  • Do not reply to spam e-mails
  • Never open attachments from unknown senders.
  • Delete spam e-mails from your mailbox or use our spam filtering
  • Please also note our special Warning emails with modified subject on suspicious emails
  • You can keep up to date with the latest warnings and notifications by visiting the ITMC Notification Page. If you have persistent doubts about suspicious emails, please contact ITMC’s Service Desk or the SIC.
  • For unknown emails, avoid clicking on links within the text - they may be spoofed
  • To see where the link in an email actually goes, hover over the link text - your browser will usually show the actual destination at the bottom of the email program or in a balloon window. This function is usually not available on smartphones!
  • If in doubt, type links by hand into the address bar of your browser, or regularly used links can be saved and accessed as bookmarks
Good to know

Sometimes spam emails also contain attack techniques such as phishing, viruses or worms. More on this in a moment and in the lesson viruses.