“RE: XXX 24-hours a day LIVE! LIVE! WEBCAMS.”

Sound familiar? Emails with subject lines like it hit Boston University students’ inboxes everyday. But they may not have to any more.

The Office of Information Technology sent an email Tuesday offering BU’s more than 40,000 email users a program called SpamAssassin in an attempt to filter out the junk emails that litter BU accounts daily.

Many students have already started taking advantage of the program, IT Director of Consulting Services Jim Stone said Wednesday.

“A lot of people who have used SpamAssassin reported that they suddenly feel like they have spam under their control,” he said.

SpamAssassin works by filtering email messages passing through BU’s central mail system and assigning each message a score based how likely it is to be spam, Stone said. The recipient’s mail program then automatically puts the messages SpamAssassin considers spam into a specific folder, separating the rubbish from legitimate emails recipients want to see in the inboxes.

Users can also change SpamAssassin’s threshold for what it considers spam in case the program filters too many emails. Stone said users should begin by using default configurations and changing settings in the future only if necessary.

“What is nice about SpamAssassin is that you don’t have to understand [the process of setting it up] to use it,” he said. “It operates in the background and does its thing.”

Separating spam into its own folder makes things much easier for readers when they have to determine what to delete, especially when there is so much junk mail that users accidentally delete legitimate email, Stone added.

Stone said IT chose SpamAssassin because of its ability to accommodate all the different types of email usage at BU. The program’s ability to allow users – rather than computers – to delete mail was also a plus, Stone said.

“You can’t just throw email away based on some program,” Stone said. “I recommend that you put them in some kind of ‘spam bucket’ and go through it every few days.”

SpamAssassin is not BU’s first attempt at helping email users filter out junk email. Before SpamAssassin became available, IT offered a program called “procmail,” but Stone said IT strongly discouraged use of the program because it was complex and outdated.

Though IT only started publicizing the program this week, Stone said SpamAssassin has been in operation for several months. IT first tested the program internally before slowly telling the BU community about it, he said. IT officials wanted to make sure the program would work for a “computing-intensive population,” he said.

But fancy programs are not the only way to combat spam, Stone said. He recommended that people treat their email addresses as they would their Social Security numbers.

“You have to think twice about giving out your email address to anyone on the web,” he said.

College of Arts and Sciences sophomore Stephanie Hsieh said she has had a major problem with spam recently, receiving 15 to 20 junk emails daily.

“Every time I wake up I have to delete at least 10 emails,” she said.

Though she has not tried SpamAssassin yet because of bad experiences with previous filtering programs, she said she would change her mind if she “heard good reviews about it.”

College of Communication freshman Amy Browning said she rarely encounters spam in her inbox, but she downloaded the program when IT began offering it anyway.

“SpamAssassin seems like a good idea for those that do have problems with spam on the BU server, and the instructions are very simple and straightforward,” she said. “I probably won’t use it since I haven’t had a problem with spam.”

But for some, the program still seems too complex. College of Engineering sophomore Jane Ko said she gave up trying to install SpamAssassin because “it got too complicated at one point.”

State and federal lawmakers each passed anti-spam laws earlier this year. But Stone said the stream of spam does not appear to be letting up, and it is an annoyance that affects all kinds of email users.

“There is no difference between faculty, staff and students when it comes to spam because we are all equally affected by it,” Stone said. “I don’t know when it’s going to end, or if it’s going to end. In the meantime, people need relief and they need spam to interfere less with their electronic life.”