Back to news | Category: Industry News » Technical | Date: 10th Jul 2009
Most people define spam as "unsolicited email", and it is the bane of most all internet users. People more in the know define it as "unsolicited bulk mail" - companies send out quite legitimate correspondence that is unsolicited - but either way dealing with it is a real concern to all businesses in this connected world.
In May 2009, it is estimated over 249 billion spam emails were sent - that’s 166 for every internet user in the world. A more staggering statistic is that something like 97% of all email is regarded as spam. This amount of junk can easily overwhelm inboxes and waste valuable company time - not to mention lead to computer viruses and identity theft.
Spam is, like most illegal activities, an arms-race between the authorities and the criminals. As usual the criminals seem to have the upper hand, but there are various solutions out there that minimise spam.
One way to protect yourself is to use one of the big webmail systems, the most popular of which being Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail. These place vast resources in combating spam for their millions of users and are often on the forefront of the fight against spam.
The downside to this is that for a business it is far more professional to have email addresses ending in your own name, rather than @hotmail.com, etc.
Some mail clients (Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, etc) have quite effective mail filters that can identify junk mail. Thunderbird in particular has a learning ability so if you tell it an email is junk it will send the next similar one to the junk mail folder too.
Some internet security software packages come with junk email filters, though these tend to not be as effective as most other solutions.
Another more popular, solution is to use what are called anti-spam gateways. These inspect emails as they are coming in and filter out spam before they end up in your inbox. First Internet has their own solution which filters out around 90% of all spam emails.
Unfortunately there are always instances where legitimate emails are blocked, and the better solutions siphon off spam into a catchall mailbox (aka "spambox") where you can inspect to make sure you are not losing customer emails. The First Internet spambox gets hundreds of spam emails a day.
Whilst the solutions above are effective - spam is here to stay and there will always be a few that make it into your inbox.
This means it's still important to remember some simple rules to protect yourself:
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