Unsolicited commercial e-mail, commonly referred to as “spam,” has risen exponentially in recent years and now accounts for 40-65% of all e-mail traffic. Spam is a problem for anyone with an email account.

Spam messages can be quite annoying or offensive. They can include attachments and URLs that, if clicked on, can install viruses or worms on your computer. Also, spam uses up your e-mail quota and the amount of spam may overwhelm legitimate email, making legitimate e-mail harder to locate.

At Penn, each School’s mail server offers a spam filter but these filters differ in how they are used and managed and how they are configured.

• Users with accounts on the following e-mail servers can apply spam filtering: pobox.upenn.edu; mail.med.upenn.edu; design.upenn.edu; dolphin.upenn.edu; ben.dev.upenn.edu; dental.upenn.edu; admissions.upenn.edu. Visit http://www.upenn.edu/computing/email/spam-filtering.html.