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Wake Forest University

Spam

Modified on: Thu, Jul 3, 2025 11:06 AM

What is spam?

Spam is the unsolicited, usually commercial, messages (such as emails, text messages, or internet postings) sent to a large number of recipients.

  • Chain letters
  • Get rich quick schemes
  • Health products
  • Offers for pornographic websites
  • Pyramid schemes
  • Stock offerings

Checking your Spam folder

  • Locate your Spam folder:
  • In Gmail, in the left navigation column, scroll to the bottom.
  • Click on More, and scroll down until you see the Spam folder.
  • Click on Spam

View your Spam folder but be careful about what you click on or open in the Spam folder. By clicking on something in your Spam folder, you may be introducing risk. Google places suspicious emails in your Spam folder based on analytics, etc.

  • Hover over a message to see the sender’s email address.
  • If it looks the least bit suspicious (e.g., the sender name doesn’t appear related to the actual email address), do not open it and don’t move it to your Inbox. Leave it in your Spam folder.
  • If you see items in the Spam folder that you want to receive in your Inbox:
    • Select the check box in front of the item, and click on ‘Not spam’ at the top in the email toolbar.
    • If you see a specific pattern of email being caught as Spam (e.g., from a mailing list or a particular person), you can set up a Gmail filter to indicate that those emails are “never spam” and should be kept in your Inbox or placed directly into a specified folder. See Using filters for more information.

Filtering spam out of your email

  • Google provides ways to mark or unmark Spam in Gmail.
  • Move it to your spam folder. Google’s spam filters will then “learn” to send future mail from that address to your Spam folder.

Some unwanted email is NOT spam

If it is a legitimate mailing that you’ve been subscribed to, then don’t mark it as spam. Instead, try one of the following: do not provide login credentials if you ever hit a unsubscbe link this could indicate the email is a phishing attempt.

  • If there is an “Unsubscribe” link, follow it for instructions.
    • Note that a phishing email might contain an unsubscribe link which, when clicked on, could lead to further problems
    • Do not provide login credentials if you ever hit a unsubscbe link, this could indicate the email is a phishing attempt.
  • If there is no “Unsubscribe” link, then you have various options to create a filter to keep mail from that address out of your Inbox. See Using filters for more information.

Where spammers get your email address

  • Some free email accounts
  • Some free web hosting companies
  • “Get paid to surf” programs
  • Open lists
  • Shareware
  • Web pages that contain your address

How to report Phishing?

If you receive a phishing email, you can mark them as such by selecting the 3 dots next to the reply button, then choosing "report phishing" this will send the email to our security team. Alternatively you can forward the email to [email protected] 

This picture shows how to report the spam email, when you hit the three dots you will see several options Filter messages like this, print, delete this message, block, report spam, and report phishing. You will want to select the report phishing option.

Emails sent on behalf of Wake Forest University

Some emails are sent by vendors on behalf of WFU.  It is often times asked “is this legit”.  One way to know for sure is by looking at the “signed by wfu.edu” in the email details:

This is a picture of the signed by wfu.edu on an email.





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