Riverside Public Schools District 96

District 96 Email Information Page

Old Address Is Gone

The email accounts that ended with @district96.w-cook.k12.il.us are discontinued. Messages coming to those addresses will be lost. Your address has been changed to end with @district96.org. You should inform your correspondents of your new email address. For help with your email account you can request assistance through the Technology Services Support Page.

District Policy

There is an Acceptable Use Policy for Technology which includes policies related to the use of District 96 email accounts. Click here to view that policy.

Avoiding Spam

You can help prevent and reduce SPAM! You should see a reduced amount of junk email now that the district96.w-cook.k12.il.us server is shut down. We have removed for District 96 pages the automatic links to email addresses and email addresses in text only. Our internet mail service provider has put together the following suggestions for reducing SPAM. Please take some time to review them and then incorporate the techniques into your email use.

From Itsamac.com
Below we have tips and tools you can use to help reduce the amount of Spam you receive in your inbox. Although there is no foolproof way to prevent you from getting Spam, there a few simple things you can do to reduce the amount of Spam you receive in your inbox:

1. Give Spam a Home: If you shop online, or enter contests, or like to request “more information” on the web, you could unwittingly be giving your email address to spammers. The trick, then, is not to give them your primary address. Set up an alternative email account with Yahoo, Hotmail, or any free service and use that address when you’re asked to enter an email address on a web form. This account will get hammered with spam, but who cares? (In fact, some of the free email services have pretty good spam filtering.) Note that major online retailers such as Amazon.com have strict privacy policies—available on their websites—about reselling your personal information. Such organizations usually can be trusted with your primary email address.

2. Don’t Advertise Your email Address: Spammers use sophisticated software to search the web for email addresses. If your website contains your email address, you could wind up on a spammer’s mailing list.

3. "Unsubscribe" and "Remove" at Your Peril: Oftentimes a spam message contains a link that promises to unsubscribe you or to take your name off a company’s mailing list. Be careful clicking such a link because spammers use such links to determine whether your email account is active. By clicking the link you may invite an avalanche of spam. This also applies to simply replying to a spam message asking them to remove you from their list - don't do it. In such situations you need to consider the source: Land’s End will stop sending you email at your request; a spammer touting the latest scheme probably won’t.

4. Disable image display in your email application: If your email application automatically displays images contained within email messages you should disable that feature. These images are sometimes retreived off of remote servers and are tagged with a coded reference to your email address. When the image is downloaded the tag is recorded and the spammer will know that you received their message - validating that your email address is active.

5. Don't use Out-of-Office or Vacation Messages: We do allow you to set an auto-reply message for when you are out of the office for an extended period or away from where you can check your email (such as when you are on vacation). The problem is that an auto-reply to a spammer simply indicates that your email account is active and therefore a ripe target for more spam.

6. Be Discreet: Don't provide your email address on bulletin boards, newsgroup postings or websites unless you know that the owners of the site will not give out your information. Always read the privacy statement of a site before providing your email address. Don't send electronic greeting cards unless the site's privacy statement guarantees that your information (including the email address of the person you're sending the card to) will not be given away to anyone.

7. Get Active: Since you and your business rely heavily on email you should get active in solving the spam problem. It is getting worse every day and is threatening to remove any usefullness email or the Internet may have. There is only so much we or any other service provider can do reduce Spam - there is no switch we can flip or button to press that will eliminate it. Anything we do to enhance our mail systems or to filter Spam is simply a "stop-gap" measure. These may reduce the amount of Spam in your mail box, but they will not keep Spam from overloading networks or collapsing mail systems - the problem is growing too fast. So you should get active - we highly recommend going to spam.abuse.net and read up on what you can do.

The above is edited from the Itsamac.com site. We are currently considering adopting an anti-SPAM feature offered by Itsamac.

WebMail

Your email is available anywhere you can connect to the Internet. Start up a browser and go to http://webmail.itsamac.com where you will need your name and password to access your email. In the name field type your email address but substitue a % for the @ symbol. For example teachera%district96.org instead of teachera@district96.org. In the password field enter your password. Once logged into your webmail account, you will find a Help link to assist you.