Q: I am so sick of all the spam that is sent to my business email address. I spend an hour every morning just trying to sort out the good email from the bad. I know I could just delete it all, but I'm afraid I'll accidentally delete email that might be important to my business. Short of unplugging my computer, what's the best solution for dealing with spam?
Sending Email A: I feel your pain. I, too, miss the good old days when the only time you'd spend an hour dealing with spam was trying to pry it out of the can.
Nyms not only combats spam, it is one more layer of protection against other email threats viruses, worms, spyware, adware, phishing scams, and more. Better than a spam filter, Nyms puts you in control of your incoming email because it uses disposable, alias addresses. When your Nyms email aliases are shared with spammers, you can simply disable that Nyms alias and stop the spam from flooding your real inbox. spam filter to pinpoint where unsolicited messages are coming from and kill spam at its source.
Reading Email Due to the nature of my business, I get a lot of unwanted email. I've been working on the Internet since 1995 and my email address has been publicly exposed for most of that time, so I am a spammer's delight. It is no exaggeration to say that I used to receive more than 400 email messages a day. Out of those 400 messages about 10% were from people I knew, 10% were from people I needed to know, and the rest were from people that I would like to track down and field dress with a very dull knife.
There are some things that you can do to make your online experience a little bit easier. There are some ways to keep spam from ruining your day. Spam filters are one of those things. Spam filters are an extremely successful way of managing or stopping unwanted emails, but occasionally they can work too well. While they can act very vigorously to keep your inbox from receiving spam, they can also prevent you from getting many of your wanted emails as well.
Storing Email Spammers, they are called. the scourge of the Internet. the digital kin of the lowly telemarketer and dreaded junk mailer.
mail that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients. Thus, mail. Some definitions of spam specifically include the aspects of email that is unsolicited and sent in bulk. Spam filter is a program that is used to detect unsolicited and unwanted email and prevent those messages from getting to a user's inbox. Like other types of filtering programs, a spam filter looks for certain criteria on which it bases judgments.
Email Software After listening to me complain about spam for months, my lead engineer burst into my office a few weeks ago and announced, "I've solved our spam problem! I've installed a spam filter on our server that will prevent spam from getting through."
The new anti spam filters are easy to set up from the web based control panel Aplus.Net offers to its web hosting customers. The service is flexible allowing the user to select from several settings and to tune up the sensitivity of the filters. spam is not an exact science and that's why some legitimate mail may go to the spam folders if the filter is tuned to be very sensitive. That's why Aplus.Net gives the option to it's customers to review the spam folders, before erasing the spam.
Antispam Software Great, I thought, now I can find something new to complain about.
of Cloudmark Server Edition spam filtering for Microsoft Exchange and you' spam, phishing protection for 15 days, free of charge.
Fight Spam I wondered what I would do with the extra two hours a day this wonderful spam filter would give me. My joy quickly waned when within a day my email went from 400 to 40. It was the saddest day of my life. Sitting there staring at my empty email box I suddenly felt very alone. At that moment I realized that not only had I come to expect the morning deluge of email, but I had come to find comfort in it. The spammers had become my friends. They wanted me to get rich quick and brighten my smile. They wanted to enhance my love life with generic Viagra and give me great deals on miniature cameras, low interest loans, waterfront property, and more. And the sheer number of folks concerned about the abundance (or lack thereof) of my anatomy was incredibly heart warming.
Stoping Spam And the ladies that sent me email were so nice. They were worried that I was lonely and offered to cure my loneliness if only I gave them a credit card number. How sweet is that?
Block Spam After a few days the withdrawal symptoms ceased and I was happy to be free of the majority of the spam, though to this day I'm afraid that I might be missing out on something grand.
Spam Emails You and I are not alone, Anna. According to a recent study by eMarketer, the average Internet email user now receives 81 emails a day, and nearly one quarter of them are spam. Spam now makes up more than 40% of all email and costs U.S. companies more than $10 billion annually. Seventy-six billion unsolicited e-mail messages will be delivered in 2003.
Email Account So how do spammers get your email address in the first place? It's easier than you might think. While some spam comes as a result of online purchases (yes, there are companies that will sell your email address no matter what their privacy policy says), that's just one of the ways spammers get you in their sites.
Sending Email Spammers use "spider software" to crawl the web and harvest email address, so if you have a personal or company website that has your email posted on it, sooner or later a spam spider is going to grab your address and add it to the mill. Likewise when you sign up to take online surveys or receive email newsletters, you are potentially exposing yourself to spammers.
Reading Email
How can you reduce the amount of spam you get? Many people think that you can't fight spam, so you should just accept it and move on. In other words, you can not fight the Borg, so smile and be assimilated into the fold. While spam is hard to eliminate, there are things you can do to lessen the amount of spam you receive and it's impact on your daily business life.
Storing Email First, stop clicking on the "unsubscribe" links at the bottom of spam emails. While some of the links are valid and will get you removed from spammer's lists, other are actually there just to let the spammer know that your address is valid. Click the link to unsubscribe and you might actually see the amount of spam you receive increase.
Email Software Second, it's a good idea to have at least two e-mail addresses. Use one for personal or business use, and the other for surveys and online purchases.
Antispam Software Third, consider installing a spam blocking software on your computer or company network. There are a variety of spam blocking applications on the market that range in price from free to a hundred bucks. Though none of them will completely eliminate spam, they can greatly reduce the volume you receive. Search the Web for "spam filter" and investigate the ones that you feel are right for you.
Fight Spam Your Internet Service Provider should also offer an anti-spam application, but be careful how you use it. I have a client who recently increased the sensitivity of their ISP spam blocker to the point that nothing was getting delivered to their company email accounts, including their own company newsletter. They had effectively built an email brick wall that stopped the spam and everything else. Not a good idea.
Stoping Spam Before investing in a commercial spam blocker you might also try adjusting the email filtering settings in your email software. Microsoft Outlook, for example, lets you set rules for handling incoming mail. The same is true with Outlook Express, Eudora, and Apple's Mail OSX. Each have built-in filtering features that can help eliminate unwanted email by parameters you set.
Block Spam One thing to remember is that if spam didn't work, it would quickly go away. In other words, if spammers weren't profiting from sending unwanted emails they would go do something else.
Spam Emails Probably become a telemarketer or credit card debt collector.
Email Account Whether you use a commercial product or rely on your existing email software to filter out spam, just be careful that you don't batten down the hatches so tight that you no longer receive any email at all.
Sending Email Here's to your success!
Reading Email Tim Knox tim@dropshipwholesale.net
Storing Email
About The Author: Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net . Related Links: http://www.prosperityandprofits.com
http://www.smallbusinessqa.com http://www.dropshipwholesale.net http://www.30dayblueprint.com http://www.timknox.com
Email Software Tim serves as the president and CEO of three successful technology companies and is the founder of DropshipWholesale.net . Related Links: http://www.prosperityandprofits.com
http://www.smallbusinessqa.com http://www.dropshipwholesale.net http://www.30dayblueprint.com http://www.timknox.com
Contact him at http://www.smallbusinessqa.com
[ Comment, Edit or Article Submission ]
