For college students looking for a cheap meal, Spam may be the way to go. But for most students, spam is something not being served on their dinner plates, but a nuisance flooding their e-mail inboxes.

"I used to not get a lot of junk mail," said Tracie Wessels, a senior in the College of Business Administration. "Ever since I opened an e-mail from an individual that said it pertained to a class I have, my mailbox has been flooded with junk mail. It causes so many problems; my mail box is constantly bombarded with messages from the system administrator saying I have too many messages."

Wessels is not the only student facing issues with spam, according to Kathy Lang, chief information officer for Information Technology Services.

"There has been a huge increase in the number of spam messages in the past year," Lang said. "One of the main reasons is that spammers have gotten more sophisticated so the messages are getting around spam and junk mail filters."

This resurgence of junk e-mail pertaining to everything from Viagra to replica watches is somehow finding ways to sneak past the filters, leaving students, staff and faculty frustrated.

"There are various ways that spam can get around junk mail filters," Lang said. "One way is to send out images instead of actual text. Most spam filters cannot read the images. Spammers also tweak their messages so they do not get flagged as high as they normally would. There is a level of filtering that we can adjust, but the more we filter the higher the chance that legitimate e-mail will be flagged as junk e-mail."

The university offers ways to assist those inundated with spam.

"The Help Desk does receive complaints regarding spam e-mail," Lang said. "Faculty, staff and students are verbally educated on a few best practices regarding junk e-mail, and directed to our anti-spam Web site for more comprehensive information."

While a hindrance to students, faculty and staff, spam on the whole does not have any major negative effects on a computer itself.

"The largest issue with spam is that it increases the amount of space taken up in your mailbox and counts against your quota," Lang said.

Given the resurgence in the amount of spam, Lang said the university is searching for ways to cut spam out of eMarq's diet.

"We are currently looking at ways of tweaking our existing infrastructure to better filter out spam," Lang said. "We are also in the process of planning an

upgrade to our e-mail system and this would include new anti-spam functionality."

Not everyone is being bombarded with spam.

"I personally have not gotten that much more junk e-mail," said Andrea Miller, a junior in the College of Communication. "I have talked to some people though that have been having problems with it and are trying to figure out how to better filter it out."