It’s estimated that of the 4 million emails that are sent to UNM inboxes daily, almost 95 percent of them are filtered and discarded as spam.
Occasionally, spam slips through the filters that UNM has set up on all inboxes. As spammers become more sophisticated, preventing junk gets harder, said Duane Arruti, interim chief information officer for UNM IT.
Filtering emails depends on the sender reputation and the content of the email, Arruti said. Considering these factors, the filtering system determines the likelihood that the message is spam, and either discards it or sends it through.
Messages with an 80 percent probability of spam are discarded, and if a message is identified with a 50 percent or higher probability, “spam” is written in the subject line.
According to Arruti, spammers are able to obscure where the messages are being sent from, forcing the filtering system to rely on the email’s content to identify spam.
Many spam emails are sneaking through the systems because the content is similar to emails that may be sent between individuals, and in many, there are few grammatical errors or formatting errors.
As a result, the system often struggles to accurately identify an email as spam.
For Mileena Rodriguez, a freshman theater major, spam emails started hitting her inbox last week.
“They all offer fake jobs,” she said. “They should (better) safeguard the student emails.”
Rodriguez expressed concern that student and faculty emails are accessible online through UNM’s directory, adding that she received eight of these soliciting emails in one week.
Stephen Spence, manager of the Collaborative Applications Team for UNM’s IT Department, noted the concern.
“IT staff have been working with staff in the office of the Vice President of Enrollment Management to help limit what information is published in the directory,” he said.
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However, emails accessed through the directory may be only one part of the problem, Spence said.
Spammers have scripts that simply send messages to deviations of standard names — like agarcia, bgarcia, cgarcia — or to a formula for email addresses.
This allows them to send to huge numbers of emails to potential victims, Spence said.
The most effective way to combat spam emails is to forward them to spamdrop@unm.edu he said.
There, the IT Department will use them to update the filtering system, increasing the accuracy with which it identifies and deletes spam, he said.
One of the IT Department’s primary concerns is safeguarding students from “phishing” scams, a method used by scammers to steal sensitive information from online accounts.
Alexandra Bernard, a freshman theater major, said she fell victim to a phishing scam on her UNM email.
In an email, a scammer posed as the University and threatened to delete her account unless she changed the password. Bernard said she complied and submitted her password via a link provided in the email.
Once she realized her mistake, she contacted the IT Department and was able to change her information.
Spence emphasized UNM IT will never ask for a password in an email and that users should exercise caution when clicking unrecognized links and attachments in emails.
He also noted UNM users who believe their information has been stolen should visit the IT website to find resources to mitigate the damage.
Brendon Gray is a news reporter for the Daily Lobo. He can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @notgraybrendon.
