Have you received an e-mail message from Robert Lavelle lately? If not, you're either lucky or late in the alphabet. Or maybe you've been invited -- several times in one day -- to become a "home worker."
Cornell Information Technologies has received complaints from all over the campus about these ubiquitous bits of "spam," or junk e-mail, repeatedly popping up in almost everyone's mailbox.
The Robert Lavelle spam contains a cryptic religious message about the coming apocalypse and has arrived with a variety of subject headers, including such disturbing lines as "When everyone starts to eat everyone" and "You have three months to live." The home-workers spam is a retread of those classified ads you see in almost every newspaper for people to "stuff envelopes."
"Robert Lavelle," or at least the person or organization signing that name, apparently obtains a new account with an information service provider and sends out thousands of these messages. Recipients promptly complain, and the ISP cancels the account. "Lavelle" then simply signs up with another ISP and repeats the process, and the messages keep coming.
According to CIT, the ones that come here appear to be addressed to every Cornell e-mail address, in alphabetical order. The home-workers spam seems to have been posted to every open mailing list operated by Cornell's listproc system.
"We attempt to filter spam but not based on content," explained Eric Nobel, abuse complaint coordinator for CIT. "If we filter on content then all legitimate messages with those words in them would be blocked."
Unfortunately, he added, some of the filtering methods don't cut in until as many as a thousand of the offending messages have gotten through. In the case of the Lavelle spam, these are always same thousand or so addresses at the beginning of the list, so those unfortunate people continue to receive the messages.
The best way to deal with spam, according to Marjorie Hodges Shaw, policy adviser to CIT, is to use Eudora's filtering capabilities on your own e-mail. When you do receive spam, it's useful to forward a copy to the sender's ISP. It's not a good idea to reply directly to the message, because this simply confirms for the sender that yours is a valid e-mail address, and the spammer may not only continue sending you messages but may sell lists of such addresses to others.
CIT has posted information on the Lavelle spam, with hints on how to set up your own filters and links to sites with further information about spam in general, at www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/news/newsflash.html#lavellespam.
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