How To Keep Spam at Bay The following tips can help curb the influx of spam, freeing your inbox for relevant messages and increasing productivity: Employ an email security solution This solution should protect your network from spam and viruses while still allowing legitimate email through. Before investing in any security solution, however, consider the size of your business and IT resources (if any) and make sure to select the solution that best fits your needs. Create a spam filter Once you have your anti-spam solution in place, you need to configure the type of filter required. A good place to start is to have a filter that focuses on the most common spam criteria: the “To” field. Spam is rarely addressed to you personally, so it’s important to configure your filter to reroute email that is not directed to you or does not have your email address in the “To” field. Test the filter to see how much, if any, legitimate email is tagged as spam. If this occurs, simply adjust your filter settings to allow addresses commonly mistaken for spam to reach your inbox. Give employees some control Allow your employees the option to sort through their own junk mail to determine what is and isn’t spam; sometimes legitimate emails can accidentally end up in the junk or trash folder. You might also want to consider allowing them to set their own spam filter variables. Educate on secure email practices Advise your employees to be on the lookout for suspicious email messages, and to never fill out forms in email messages that ask for personal or financial information or passwords. Remember that legitimate companies will never ask for this type of information via email. Make sure to also remind your employees to never respond to spam. A response will let the spammer know they have reached an active email address, and this just leads to even more spam. Likewise, clicking on links within a spam email that promises to remove you from the sender’s mailing list will again just confirm the email address for the spammer. Consider alternate email address options Once you make your email address public on the Internet, you risk finding an inbox full of spam. Some suggestions:
Remove email addresses from your business website If you have your email address or employees’ email addresses posted on your business website, expect spam. Address-harvesting spambots will trawl your site and extract what it determines as email addresses. Specifically, it will look for the “name@company.com” sequence. If you are determined to leave email addresses on your website, spell out the address – “name at company dot com”—this will drastically reduce spam. Otherwise, remove email addresses and use web-based forms instead. Report spam Report suspicious online promotions of Symantec/Norton branded software to spamwatch@symantec.com You may also inform the local contact of the Business Software Alliance (check the contacts list at www.bsa.org ), or you can also file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about a particular spam email. |
Carl Mazzanti is Co-Founder and President of eMazzanti Technologies, Microsoft’s four time Partner of the Year and one of the premier IT consulting services for businesses throughout the New York metropolitan area and internationally. Carl and his company manage over 400 active accounts ranging from professional services firms to high-end global retailers.
eMazzanti is all about delivering powerful, efficient outsourced IT services, such as computer network management and troubleshooting, managed print, PCI DSS compliance, green computing, mobile workforce technology, information security, cloud computing, and business continuity and disaster recovery.
Carl Mazzanti is also a frequent business conference speaker and technology talk show guest and contributor at Microsoft-focused events, including frequent prominent roles at the Microsoft Inspire (Worldwide Partner Conference / WPC).
Carl, a serial Entrepreneur, gives back to the community through Entrepreneur teaching engagements at Georgetown University, the company’s ocean wildlife conservation effort, the Blue Project, and Tree Mazzanti.
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