Welcome to the newest feature of the St. Charles School District website. Talk on Tech will feature monthly updates on using and understanding the technology available within the district. Enjoy!

Spam

Already You are the Winner Most Lucky!

I remember being ten years old, stalking the mailman each summer day. I was hoping for a letter back from Jenny, the girl from Pennsylvania I met on the family vacation to Orlando. I didn't mind the long, hot hours spent staking out the front yard. I got excited when the mail truck appeared at the top of Longford Drive. Maybe today would bring word from the woman that, with a committed courtship and a long campaign of letter-writing, I hoped to someday divorce.

For the most part, that kind of correspondence is a thing of the past. Because of today's technology, when we want to stay in touch with family, complain to businesses, or talk to girls we met in Florida, we can communicate instantaneously. Email is so prevalent that it's tough to find someone who doesn't have it. Electronic communication has truly made the world a smaller place.

And then, there are the spammers, who set up automated systems for inundating your email box with unwanted, sometimes offensive material. In this, the first of a series of columns detailing technology use and safety in the St. Charles School District, well discuss who the spammers are, and what your tech team is doing to stop them.

What they do, and why they do it

In the old days of paper junk mail, senders had significant postage and material costs between them and your mailbox. Today, setting up an email server is relatively cheap and easy. And because it's a machine, it doesn't balk about working 24 hours a day to let you and every other carbon based life form know that you have, in fact, already won.

Won what? It doesn't matter. Maybe a boat. Maybe access to drugs without prescriptions. Want whiter teeth? Just click the link. Bill Gates is dying to give you a big chunk of his fortune, if only you'll tell ten friends to get some, too. The good luck never seems to stop raining on your inbox. Why, people from Africa have heard about you. If you haven't already, you should soon be getting a letter from the son of a prominent and wealthy African, who wants for reasons that aren't really clear to send you millions of dollars. He'll just need your bank account info.

Does anybody really fall for this stuff? A small percentage of people really do. But as this excellent article by the University of Oregon's Dr. Joseph St. Sauver points out, spammers don't even count on you buying that discount Viagra they're hawking. Junk e-mailers can generate profits without selling a thing. If you click on their links, or even the unsubscribe option, spammers count you as a visitor to their websites. They then use this artificially inflated traffic to sell ad space to other companies.

The result? Spammers make money for doing nothing more than annoying you. In this regard, they are not unlike television comedian Bob Saget, formerly of Americas Funniest Home Videos infamy.

What were doing about spam

On the topic of junk emails, picture your district technology staff like a vanguard of knights in shining armor, guarding the gates of our technological kingdom against gnats. We have many intimidating security systems in place, but the reality is that there are so many spammers spamming away out there that some sneak through.

Our first line of defense is a new technology we implemented over the summer. MOREnet, our Internet service provider, has worked with us and other districts to block spam before it ever approaches our private network. The program isn't completely successful, but we do estimate that it has reduced junk mail by about 80 percent.

We also have a nifty device called a proxy server, which acts as the gatekeeper for all traffic in and out of the district. We've tweaked that server to be aware of the worst spammers, and taken countermeasures against them. Finally, we have anti-virus software that knocks down spam traffic generated by a virus type called a worm, which sneaks into your address book and sends bulk mail without you even realizing it.

Our final defense is manually tracking and blocking individual spammers, when new ones happen across our network like ants stumbling across a picnic. We can go in and block emails from certain addresses from ever appearing in your mailbox. However, there are problems with this last approach. The main one being that spammers - like gnats - multiply and swarm pretty fast. Once they elude our electronic bug zappers, swatting them can be more than a full time job.

Canning the spam

Want to help us swat gnats? Be careful who gets your email address. Don't sign up for free offers! online. When you do get spam, never hit the unsubscribe option - often, that leads to more spam, not less. These folks aren't known for their ethics.

Finally, the biggest thing you can do to help is find and get friendly with the delete key. Until there are real, enforceable laws against unsolicited mass mailings (check here for developments in that area), spam is going to be a fact of life. When that next ad arrives promising you leaner abs, more endurance, African riches or a good deal on an illegally smuggled panda, pretend it is screaming when your index finger sends it off to oblivion. Meanwhile, well keep swatting as many gnats as we can.

And if anybody hears from Jenny from Pennsylvania, tell her I never got her letter and give her my email address.