The powers that be at SSC are painfully aware of the annoyance of SPAM. Unfortunately due to the nature of the way SPAM is sent it's virtually impossible to completely block. For example, SPAMMERS typically move from gateway to gateway to send their emails and use false addresses so they cannot be tracked down or blocked out.

There has been legislation passed requiring advertising emails to allow users to "opt-out" or unsubscribe, sadly there seems to be very little enforcement of this and as a result spotty compliance. Large companies are usually ethical enough to unsubscribe if you request it, but many companies are not. Some in the internet community have come to believe that by "unsubscribing" you are simply informing the SPAMMERS that they've sent to an active account of someone who reads the email!

There are ANTI-SPAM services and are often in the form of a separate email account that you pay for, and the service tries to filter out the spam for you. SSC offers a spam filtering service for all of our email accounts. See the Blocking Spam link at the right.

In some cases you can also write to the system administrator of the service provider that the spam is coming from and inform them that you are getting unsolicited mail, in many cases this will be against their electronic policy and they will suspend the users account.

There are some things that you can actively do to limit your spam. When you go to websites that request an email address, give it something like your Yahoo! email account (if you don't have one you can create one for free on yahoo's website - Yahoo! even has a rudimentary spam filter that they call a Bulk Mail identifier) rather than your UCLA account. Even if you are say buying things from known vendors like Amazon, it's often a safer bet to give them a different account (think of it as a "shopping account"). In some cases where you are not expecting to receive any email back from the site, you may want to just give a fake account.