Please remember that using your courses to spam other students is strictly forbidden and can lead to the revocation of computing privileges at the University. Your agreement with the University upon signing up for you NetID forbids:

*Using facilities, including printers, for junk mail, mass mailing, or non-course-related work.
*Use computing resources for private profit, or for promoting a religious or political group.

Spam, in the context of Blackboard, is anything not related to the course or is not approved by your instructor. You may yearn to tell your class about Crazy Go Nuts University’s Summer Social, but there are better venues for these types of messages. The University maintains a number of mailing lists, the most popular of which being USF-TALK, which allow these types of announcements.

Please respect your classmates. They opted into no agreements to receive non-course related mail.

Sign up for USF-TALK:
http://listserv.admin.usf.edu/listserv/wa.exe?SUBED1=usftalk&A=1

Your Network Access Agreement with the University:
https://una.acomp.usf.edu/comp-agreement-static.html

Everything you wanted to know about Spam but were afraid to ask:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spam

Apply to Crazy Go Nuts University
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail26.html

Yum…. Spam:
http://www.pitt.edu/~blair1/spam-recipes.html

4 Responses to “Rash of Spamming via myUSF Plagues Users”

  1. Sean Says:

    Is there an abuse@ address that we can forward offenders to?

  2. Carolyn Says:

    I’m loving that you linked to

    Apply to Crazy Go Nuts University
    http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail26.html

    It’s always nice to see USF have a sense of humor.

  3. SEWilliamson Says:

    It’s interesting that you’re lighting a fire under the students here, yet you allow every Viagra spammer on the planet access to our accounts. I got spam here from the first day I opened this account.

    SEWilliamson, M.D.

  4. wurzel Says:

    Quote:

    >It’s interesting that you’re lighting a fire under the students here, yet you allow
    >every Viagra spammer on the planet access to our accounts. I got spam here from
    >the first day I opened this account.

    Academic Computing email addresses (I can’t speak for other departments) are not given out for solicitation or for any other reason. Universities (and many businesses) often provide a public directory of email addresses. We do so at http://directory.acomp.usf.edu. Without a USF netid, you can only access Staff and Faculty addresses. Spammers are very methodical and persistent and any page (including department and personal home pages) with email addresses is likely to be harvested for spam.

    Unfortunately USF’s networks are subject to the same woes that all networks on the open and free Internet experience. Here is a good article about how spammers get your email address: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/spam2.htm

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