Credit card solicitors have yet another avenue to get to their prey – e-mail.

And e-mail lists are readily available to potential spammers.

Michael Bowman, assistant director of Academic Information Technology, said software has been developed that can capture e-mail addresses off the Web. There are companies that create e-mail lists and then sell them.

Iowa State, though not a company, sells students’ e-mail addresses, Bowman said.

“They have to, by state law,” he said.

Bowman said the school sells what is available on the ISU directory. Students have the option to remove their e-mail from the directory through the registrar’s office.

“Iowa State is currently not filtering for spam, only viruses,” said Frank Poduska, systems analyst for Academic Information Technology. “AIT is investigating that type of technology, but that’s quite a long process.”

Bowman said a spam filtering system could be in place possibly by this fall.

Bowman said with 30- to 35,000 e-mail addresses, the “criteria for one individual can be significantly different for the next individual.” The software that AIT is looking at is not exactly a filtering system, and the final decision to use it or not would be left to the user.

What they are looking to do is to “create an environment to make it easier for the individual to handle spam,” he said.

The software passes on all of the mail, but adds a phrase in the subject line identifying potential spam e-mail, he said. The actual filtering would be by the mail client, such as Eudora or Outlook, which could automatically send mail marked with the subject phrase to a designated folder, Bowman said.

WebMail would not have to be reworked to create a filtering system looking for the phrase in the subject line, Bowman said.

“We are looking at what level of filtering can be done,” he said.

Some students have their Iowa State e-mail sent to another e-mail service such as Hotmail or Yahoo that offers spam filtering. The downside of doing this is that some class-related mail such as large PowerPoint lectures would not be accepted, Poduska said.

“You may gain some on the filtering sides, but lose some because classwork suffers,” he said.

Iowa state law requires two main things of spam e-mailers: a return address of the spammer and a means to unsubscribe, Bowman said. If the spam comes from out of state or out of country, however, the law is harder to enforce.

Until the filtering system is in place, Bowman and AIT have some recommendations. Unless the spam you receive is from a company that you recognize and trust, do not unsubscribe.

“[Unsubscribing] is another way to verify that the e-mail [address] is good and the e-mail is being used,” Bowman said. Other than that, “there isn’t a lot that you can do,” Bowman said.

“Someone that is not out there on the network is less exposed,” and therefore is less likely to receive spam, Bowman said.

Poduska’s recommendation is to treat spam e-mail like regular junk mail. “Feel free to throw it away real quick.”

Bowman’s recommends when you receive spam is to “quit trying to figure out how and why you’re on this list. Put it in the trash and go on and do something more productive.”