Spam, unwanted email messages, now account for three quarters of our daily inbox, and at certain times of the year this percentage can be even higher. But why should we be concerned about spam and regard it as anything more than an unavoidable irritation?
Because spam, or junk mail as it is also known, affects our bottom line as a company:
· It is time-consuming to download and delete.
· It eats bandwidth.
· Time spent creating filters, managing inboxes and combating spam could be used more profitably concentrating on core business activities.
· Spam often contains offensive content, scams or viruses.
Despite most email software and Internet Service Providers running server-level filtering, many unwanted emails still manage to run the gauntlet and arrive where they are not wanted. However, as users, we can at least take some steps to make life harder for the spammers.
Obtaining active email addresses to spam involves a variety of techniques. Spammers will often simply use software that guesses addresses to target a domain with a myriad of user names plucked from the ether. This explains why sales@ and info@ are such spam magnets.
Chiefly, though, spammers rely on human fallibility in order to harvest genuine email addresses. For example, email addresses frequently appear on web pages and as such are easy targets for spam bots that crawl websites in a similar way to search engines.
Threat and Solution
Email addresses on a web page: embed email addresses as images or via a Java Script or pukka email web form, none of which spam bots can read, or as text but with an element that users know to remove, e.g. sales@<Removethisbit>mydomain.com.
Online registration forms: always check whether the site’s privacy policy includes a commitment not to sell on email addresses of users. Restrict what web content users can access while at work.
Email subscription cancellations: don’t respond to these emails unless you actively opted-in to receive mail from the sender in the first place. Most email subscription list cancellation emails merely dupe users into confirming that an email address is active and genuine. The same holds true of replying to any other form of junk mail, tempting as it may be to vent one’s wrath. To add insult to injury, replying to a spam message will also result in a mail undeliverable message adding to the existing congestion in your inbox.
Spammers selling on addresses to other spammers: realistically there is nothing the average person can do to stop this trade. Even the FBI can’t shut down the spammers.
Next time: more dos and don’ts of email management
