If you use email in your business, you’re going to receive SPAM. There’s no way around it. According to Communications and Research Analyst, David Kelleher, “Conservative estimates suggest that 100 billion SPAM messages clog the internet daily – this means that nine out of every ten emails sent out are useless.” The problem is so widespread that people have started to take SPAM for granted and an acceptable cost of using the technology. “Deleting ten useless emails is one thing, but having to sift through hundreds of junk messages every morning is another and calls for a different approach to simply pressing the ‘delete’ key.” says Kelleher. “Factor in a few hundred employees and you get the picture.”
The Cost of SPAM
Dealing with SPAM is expensive for a small business. If you and your employees are spending even 15 minutes a day reading through, sorting and deleting SPAM from your email, that adds up to a lot of lost productivity in a week, month or year. The cost of SPAM to companies is not easy to assess, but estimates of $10 billion a year in the United States alone is not far off the mark, suggests Kelleher. “What is certain is that companies could be in deep trouble if they do not deal with SPAM effectively.” It’s impossible to eradicate SPAM but that doesn’t mean companies have no recourse to minimize it.
Tips for Minimizing SPAM
- Use a reputable SPAM blocker software. There are many products on the market that use a variety of technologies that inspect words, phrases and the history of mail exchanges between the sender and the recipient. Others work by checking the sender’s e-mail address against blacklists, grey lists and whitelists. The problem is, SPAM is subjective. What’s SPAM for one person, could be a crucial newsletter for someone else. Using some form of SPAM blocking software service allows suspicious emails to be held in a special folder on the service provider’s website. You can check this regularly and white-list any emails that were trapped that you do want to receive. It only takes a short amount of time for you to ‘catch’ those regular emails you want to receive that ended up being blocked. It is also easy for you to block any that get by the software’s algorithm so they won’t get through in the future.
- Create two email accounts. The first email account should have your name in it and be used only for serious, personal communications. The second email account has no restrictions for a username and is used for registration pages and websites that require you to enter an email in order to access or contribute to them. This will protect your business email from receiving SPAM. The latter could be registered through a generic email service.
- Don’t publish your professional email address online. And never submit your professional email address to a website in order to gain access or contribute to that site, whether they tell you they’ll keep it confidential or not. They usually don’t. Instead, have an email form web users can fill in that is forwarded to you directly. As long as you respond quickly, people won’t mind contacting you this way.
- Never click on emails that are sent to your professional email account that are from people you don’t know or refer to a conversation you don’t remember. Sometimes SPAM emails are sent with a notice of receipt function on them, letting the person who emailed you know that you opened the email. Opening SPAM emails only encourages SPAMmers to keep sending you SPAM.
- Don’t reply to, or forward, forwarded emails from friends and coworkers unless it’s absolutely necessary. Often times email collection services (SPAMmers) will send a joke, an alarming notice, or a warning of doom out to a number of people hoping they will forward the email to their friends, and that their friends will forward it again, eventually leaving a very long list of email addresses on the original message, to be collected later.
Work with your IT provider or server
Chances are your internet service provider already has a SPAM filter applied to your email account. Talk with them about the kinds of SPAM you are getting and whether emails that should be getting through to you are getting hung up in the filter, and work with them to develop a strategy that works for you and your business. “SPAM will not go away on its own,” says Kelleher, “but investing in an anti-SPAM product can make all the difference for a company. It is an investment that pays off immediately.”
Reducing SPAM requires good technology, but it can also be achieved by increasing employee awareness. Show your employees how they can avoid getting onto SPAM lists and make it part of your business policy. If all your employees use these strategies, you will minimize the amount of wasted productivity from SPAM in your business.