Vol. 19, No. 11

Nov. 11, 1999

Avoid e-mail scams

Beware of e-mail scams! Two messages, claiming to be connected with AOL, Microsoft and J. Crew, are making the e-mail rounds, promising money to students who forward the messages. Students are advised to delete these messages and not to forward them. Computer users who forward these messages to class mailing lists will be charged with violation of the Responsible Computing Policy and will face serious sanctions. When students forward such messages to lists of hundreds of class lists, it generates an incredible amount of mail that the UD system has to process, according to Betsy Mackenzie, Systems Security, Access and Help Services. When all junk e-mail shows up in their mailboxes, students become angry and fire off responses, which go not only to the original sender but to the lists of members as well, if the user selects "respond to all" instead of "respond to sender." The flood of mail quickly runs out of control, Mackenzie said. "We are asking for student cooperation to solve this problem," Mackenzie said. For more information, call Mackenzie at 831-1975 or send e-mail to <betsy@udel.edu>.