Lately a number of people have begun using SPAM blockers provided by their Internet Service Providers (notably Earthlink).

The blockers work something like this. I send you an email message and instead of you getting my email the spam blocker automatically blocks my email, and sends me a message similar to this: " ... Please fill out this one time request to to put your name into my address book ..."

Please be advised that I will not fill out these forms. It is your responsibility to make sure you can access your email. It is not my responsibility to spend extra time filling out a form just because you have not figured out how to handle SPAM.

In addition be advised that my email might NOT come from my CSUN email address but might come from wherever I happen to be when I check my email, which could be anywhere.

Finally, be advised that I require all CSUN students to have email. I will only send email to your CSUN email address. If you do not use the CSUN email system you should set up mail forwarding to whatever address you do use.

If you feel SPAM is getting out of hand restricting email to people in your address book is not the solution. Instead of using a web based client you should consider a POP or IMAP based client such as Thunderbird that has a trainable SPAM filter, and then train it yourself. Its a lot of work at first but it really does work in the end.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.