How prevalent is Spam?
In November 2006, the European Commission reported that spam makes up between 50 to 80 percent of all messages sent to email inboxes.
According to Ferris Research of San Francisco spam cost the United States an estimated $17 billion in lost productivity and the expense of measures to fight it during 2005. Although laws now exist in the United States and the European Union that makes it illegal to knowingly send spam because the Internet opens borders and thinks globally, these laws are fine and good, but do not stop the problem.
Spam is now coming from other countries in ever-greater numbers. These emails are harder to fight, because they come from countries where there are no anti-spam laws and regulations. So what do you do about this?
Here are the top 5 Rules to do to protect from spam.
Number 1: Do what you can to avoid having your email address out on the net.
There are products called “spam spiders” that search the Internet for email addresses to send email to. If you are interested, do a search on “spam spider” and you will be amazed at what you get back. Interestingly, there is a site, WebPoison.org, which is an open source project geared to fight Internet “spambots” and “spam spiders”, by giving them bogus HTML web pages, which contain bogus email addresses.
A couple suggestions for you: a) use form emails, which can hide addresses or also b) use addresses like sales@company.com instead of your full address to help battle the problem. c) There are also programs that encode your email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email address on web pages so that while spam spiders find it difficult or impossible to read your email address.
Number 2: Get spam blocking software.
There are many programs out there for this. One of the best for the home user is iHateSpam. Whatever you do, get spam filtering software. It will save you time. No spam filtering software is foolproof, but they really do help. You usually have to do some manual set up to block certain types of email.
Click HERE for more information about iHateSpam.
Number 3: Use the multiple email address approach.
There are a lot of free email addresses to be had. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then have a “back-up” email address. It would be like giving your sell phone number to your best friends and the business number to everyone else.
Number 4: Attachments from people you don’t know are BAD, BAD, BAD.
A common problem with spam is that they have attachments and attachments can have viruses. Corporations often have filters that don’t let such things pass to you. Personal email is far more “open country” for spamers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who is sending you something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service as well.
Number 5: Email services now have “bulk-mail” baskets.
If what you use currently does not support this, think about moving to a new vender. The concept is simple. If you know someone, they can send you emails. If you don’t know them, put them in the bulk email pile and then “choose” to allow them into your circle. Spam Blocking software has this concept as well, but having extra layers seems critical these days, so it is worth looking into.
