No, we’re not suggesting that you take your favorite variety of Spam, some lures, and go fishing!
Spam, in the electronic sense, is also referred to as UBE or UCE. These acronyms stand for unsolicited bulk or commercial email respectively because the logistics and technology of spam both require and allow it to be sent very quickly and in large amounts (bulk) to make a profit (commercial) for the “spammer”. We use the word spam generally for any unsolicited email that includes commercial, bulk, or phishing.
Phishing is a relatively new form of spam which attempts to trick the user into thinking the request is legitimate and often requests personal information be given in response to the message. Phishing messages are typically sent to mimic some type of financial institution but can also be sent to imitate any type of organization you already trust.
The best advice that we can give you about spam here at MCCCD is to never use your work email address for personal reasons. If you don’t have a personal email address, free email accounts are available for your use from Gmail, Yahoo, Netzero and Hotmail. Never use your work email address to sign up with your bank or financial institution. If you do this, you will then know that any email sent to your MCCCD email account that appears to be from a financial institution is most likely one phishing for personal information.
The second piece of advice we can give you is that if it looks strange, it is probably spam. Spammers will try their best to trick you into clicking on a message. You may wish to review this article for more information (note: disregard and close the ad that it produces). Hopefully the article will not convince you to quit your day job and take up spamming as a moneymaking pursuit!
Our third piece of advice is if you didn’t ask for the message, or don’t remember asking people to send you messages about their products, don’t click it. If you don’t recognize the sender, definitely do not click the message. If you receive an email advertising a product that you desire, a good option for you to consider is to “google” the product on the internet and compare pricing from various companies.
Finally, if the message is coming from your email address to your account and you did not send it, it is almost certainly not from your account. For more information, please visit our FAQ.
Special thanks to Robert Seifert, DO ITS, for contributing this article
Click here to see an Index of common ITS acronyms