Spam: Junk E-Mail

Nice email from Jay McSweeney regarding Spam today!

In October 2005, over 332,990 email messages were sent to District recipients from Internet sources. Of these, our system identified and blocked 208,571 messages (over 62%) because they were spam or infected with a virus. Currently, we are 99.6% successful at blocking spam messages, but with this kind of volume, some are bound to make it through.

Spammers are always finding new ways to defeat spam blockers and spam filters, since it's in their best interest to do so and they have more time available to figure out how to circumvent any safeguards and more to gain by devoting full time efforts to invent new ways to get around those safeguards. Our blocking technology is always being updated to counter these new techniques. There is no way to completely eliminate spam without rejecting some percentage of legitimate email. Currently, we believe it's more important to make sure ALL legitimate email gets through at the risk of having a small percentage of spam enter our system.

At home you receive paper junk mail and you simply throw it away without reading it. How did you get into this habit? You realized reading it was a waste of time. You need to take the same approach with your electronic junk mail. Trash it without reading it.

Washington State has one of the toughest anti-spam laws in the nation. If you have a complaint about a particular sender, or message, you can log on here to read about your possible recourse or to file a complaint.

He also sent this reminder today:

A recent increase in the number of unofficial email messages sent to the PSD-All list as well as certain building-level mail lists reminds us that now is a good time to remember that the District email system is for official use only.

Not only is it a violation of district Policy 2022, and Regulation 2022R, it is a waste of precious bandwidth and server storage space when unofficial messages are sent via the District's email system.

If you have any questions about whether or not the message you are about to send is within proper and acceptable use guidlines, I encourage you to visit the official Puyallup School District's Board Policies web page and review these documents under the "2000 Series" link.

Jay continues to do great work for Puyallup Kids! Thanks Jay!