In one week, Michael Hoadley received about 20 spam e-mails from a business vendor who was sending out messages concerning technology.

The e-mails were being sent almost every two hours, said Hoadley, assistant vice president of Academic Affairs for Technology.

Many others who use an Eastern e-mail account also often receive spam.

Eastern accounts, combined, receive about 4.5 million e-mails a day and of those, about 1 million are legitimate while the rest are spam, meaning three out of four e-mails are “junk,” said Mihir ‘Chat’ Chatterji, assistant vice president of Information Technology Services.

Besides Eastern, other universities also have large amounts of spam in their e-mail accounts.

More than half of the e-mails are spam at Western Illinois University.

“In the last seven minutes, 65 percent of e-mail was classified as spam,” said Fred Seaton, senior system manager for Western.

Western uses free software called Spam Assassin to help control their e-mail accounts and Seaton said it is about 90 percent effective.

Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, on the other hand, gets a lot less spam.

In one day, SIU-C receives about 20 spam e-mails, said Don Olson, director of Information Technology for the university.

SIU-C uses Send Mail to control spam and Olson thinks it is very useful.

“It’s not cheap, but it catches viruses and spam,” he said.

For Eastern, the amount of spam it receives is not cheap either.

“It cost lots of money to do something about it,” Chatterji said.

Currently, Eastern uses Barracuda, a safeguard program that costs $3,793 per year to help control spam e-mails.

Barracuda operates by tagging spam in the subject lines for the recipient to see but it will not delete the e-mail.

Tagging the spam and not deleting can be an issue because some individuals would prefer the messages to be deleted, which makes it difficult to “find a happy medium,” Hoadley said.

Chatterji, however, feels like allowing recipients to see the spam is best.

“Our policy is to only tag it,” he said. “At Eastern we tend to be more lenient [about spam].”

To tag spam, Barracuda, like other programs, will look at the wording of subject lines and the body to indicate if the e-mail is spam.

Certain repeated words like mortgage and online pharmacy can indicate spam e-mail, Chatterji said.

Another way the software tags spam e-mails is by seeing if it was sent to many addresses at one time.

Despite the measures taken to control spam, some messages still get overlooked by the programs and are not identified.

“There is no perfect system,” Hoadley said. “The problem is every time we try to control it, things still get through.”

The reason that some messages are overlooked is because those sending spam e-mails are aware of what programs look for in indicating spam.

“They are always fighting this game of cat and mouse,” Chatterji noted about the programs and people who send SPAM.

Besides overlooking SPAM, programs might faulty label an e-mail.

Mislabeled SPAM is very rare but it does happen, Chatterji said.

In Hoadley’s case, with the business vendor, the e-mail was being sent repeatedly by mistake and was not SPAM, but the program did properly label it as SPAM because it met the criteria.

“I think [the program] is doing about as well as you can expect it to,” Chatterji said.

SPAM programs do its best in preventing and labeling SPAM, but not everything can be controlled.

“[The] ways people get access to our e-mail accounts is uncontrollable,” Hoadley said.