SPAM or electronic junk mail are the worst nightmare of all email users. Most of the SPAM consist of commercial advertising and the worst out of all, virus or malware.
Most of email users spent the first few minutes of the working hour to clear out spam to make way for the real email.
What could be the problem with SPAM?
Lost of productivity:
- Spending 15 minutes each day in the office to filter out SPAM from valid email would translate to about 7 hours a month of productivity wastage at work. If you multiply this with the number of people in the company, it would be a serious problem to tackle.
Virus/Malware
- A small portion of SPAM come with a deceiving attachment which usually contain virus or malware. This will be a problem if the security software in your workstation or email server does not catch it. Virus or Malware have the potential of crippling your system or to the extend of stealing the important data from your workstation.
Phishing
- Have you ever receive an email from your local bank requesting you to click on a hyperlink to perform a task with your online account? Well, most local bank does not practice this, only the bad guys do it. Phishing email has causes the industry and people to lose million of dollars.
Bandwidth charges
- This would be a problem if you are on a limited bandwidth Internet connectivity esspecially on a mobile line. Each email including SPAM uses bandwidth to transmit to your device.
How do I get ride of SPAM?
To be frank, even the industry most best spam filter would not promise total SPAM annihilation. Anti-spam solution would help to reduce the amoun of SPAM that you will receive. Most of the anti-spam softwares are based on algorithm provided from the threat center. Each spam criteria/algorithm would have its specific point and an email would be considered as SPAM if the point reaches the threshold.
Software
Computer is dumb and it will treat every email as legitimate data. You would need to subscribe or purchase additional security software to minimize SPAM. Most of the off the shelves computer security software come together with anti-spam feature. Most probabably it will work out from the box or it might require minimal tweaking on your workstation to integrate.
Email Host
A good email host would already has an anti-spam gateway at the server level and filter out most of the SPAM before it could reach you. A very popular anti-spam software on the server level is SpamAssassin and most of the expensive security appliances are built based on it. Talk to your email hosting provider to get a more information.
Email Address
Use a unique email address username which is not a single word in the dictionary. Most spammers would launch a dictionary spam attack to your domain and hope some of it would reach your mailbox. Alexander@domain.com would be a spam magnet while Alexander.st@domain.com would be spam deterrent.
Posting Email address on public website
One of the most common way for spammers to retrieve the victim email address is to crawl the world wide web for possible email addresses to be included in their spam list. Try your best not to publish your email address on a public website and if you have to, you could include your email address as an image.
I hope the simple steps above would save you countless of time and resources battling SPAM.
