2008 - 2013 Flexible Learning Course

The email you see below is known as spam. It is mostly a method of marketing that is unfortunately very effective and getting very difficult to control - it could spell the end of email some day actually. Sometimes its just a simple mistake on the part of the sender.

But the reason this email came to the DFLP list is quite simple. It is because I did not have the group set on the best settings so as to block spam email. I have changed those settings now so that people have to request membership before they can post messages.

I have removed the offending character who made it through while the settings were open.

Spam (or the management of it) is very important if you become any level of online teacher. At the moment we have a person in the IT department of Otago Polytechnic who's job it is to keep on top of spammer emails and add them to a list that gets blocked. It must be a dull job, but unfortunately this is the most effective way to keep spam email out of Polytech email, unless that person takes leave. A better system might be one where all polytech email users could report an incident of spam and help build a filtering system through artificial intellegence. This is how Google is approaching the issue, but the risk is that legitimate email will get blocked, which is why Google is very light with its filtering..

Its worth knowing a little bit about spam, how it works and how to manage it. In fact, a teaching resource on this issue would be great ;)

As always, the wikipedia article on spam is a good place to start, and significant contributions to that article would count in assessment of a teaching resource.

Regards,
Leigh