"Posses all the drags you want stadia."
I've been called many names in my life (including Aura for a year in elementary school) but never before have I been mistaken for a Stadia. I wondered if Stadia was actually someone's name as I whisked the spam e-mail to my trash can.
The practice of deleting spam before reading legitimate messages in my ASU e-mail account has been the norm for years, especially in light of virus and worm warnings. I came to a point this year when I simply checked the box to select all displayed messages and unchecked the few that were actually not spam.
Perhaps I am supremely unpopular. Perhaps someone has signed me up for one too many spam lists in my stint as opinion writer.
Regardless, the spam problem affects every student on campus that uses ASU Webmail.
The advent of spam filtering stopped me from deleting my Hotmail account. Hotmail has a handy button where junk mail can be blocked and reported, but the blocked list fills quickly because spammers are relentless.
I stopped using Yahoo! e-mail about a year ago when the spam became too heavy. My finger on the mouse, I was ready to eliminate ASU e-mail and prevent more wasted time deleting spam.
But I figured there must be another way to rid myself of the troubling e-mail from Christian debt lenders and singles who wanted to meet me. The University cannot sell my e-mail address to companies surely not to drug companies e-mailing people named Stadia. But this is ASU we're talking about.
Off I clicked to the computing services Web page. I found the most recent security alert was Jan. 8, 2005, and a message announcing Computer Security Awareness Week (Sept. 20-24, 2004) remained on the page.
My faith in the University's computer security quickly waned.
Determined to rid myself of spam, I pressed on -- links leading me in circles on the help page. There it waited, the remedy to my spam woes: a tutorial on spam filtering at www.asu.edu/mailbox.
The instructions directed me to log into myASU and click on the link to EMMA, the Electronic Messaging Menu Application. The myASU portal is probably one of the few campus services most students use every day and pulls together a variety of online services into a single browser.
In my freshman year, only EMMA existed, so I learned to use it and its small e-mail quota. The shift to the myASU portal came more recently, and EMMA is now reachable through a link at the top right corner of the portal.
At the time of the change, I searched EMMA for a way to turn off the portal and happened upon the Quota Check function -- not something ASU is advertising to newer students.
The ability to increase my inbox size from a couple megabytes to 30 or 50 MB convinced me to stick with ASU's Webmail. I wondered why the University didn't automatically sign me up for this increased inbox size.
The University must have assumed I was satisfied with the industry-standard 2-MB size that consistently fills with spam. But with Hotmail increasing its mailbox size to 250 MB and GMail at 1 GB of storage, it might be good to know ASU Webmail users can get more space.
Then I found it: spam filtering, my newfound reason for sticking with ASU Webmail.
I gleefully turned the filters on, my faith renewed. Yet the filtered e-mail can only be viewed through EMMA, not through any convenient link in the myASU portal's Webmail tab.
So GMail continues its seduction, with free massive inbox size and spam filtering luring me away from the ASU e-mail account for which my tuition pays.
Maybe in my spare time not using ASU e-mail I can figure out who Stadia is.
Audra Baker is a senior in journalism and biology. You can sign her and Stadia up for more newsletters at audra.baker@asu.edu.
