Are you suffering from Spam?

The ever increasing use of the Internet has vastly stimulated the use of e-mail and this, in turn has made possible the widespread use of spam. Spam is the popular term for junk e-mails which are unsolicited,

It is estimated that businesses worldwide receive seven billion spam messages every day. Apart from the nuisance factor, spam costs organisations a lot of money. A recent report estimated that the annual cost of dealing with spam is 874 dollars per employee, this to cover the cost of deleting them and the investment in facilities to attempt to stop them.

You may ask yourself who sends spam, the statistics show that just 0.01% of spam e-mails sent result in an enquiry about the product or service that is being offered. This means that the spammer (sender of spam) needs to send out 1000 e-mails to get one response.

With broadband internet connections it is fairly straightforward to send hundreds of thousands of e-mails every single day. By using a database of e-mail addresses (that can be purchased over the internet), a spammer can send out enough e-mails to generate a few hundred enquiries per day. And because broadband internet connections are unmetered there is no cost to the spammer other than the fixed cost of the line. Thus it is not difficult to find an economic justification for the spammer to send out thousands of e-mails every day.

So what can you do about spam?

Legislation has been proposed but one argument against it is that there are a number of organisations (both business and charities) that need to send out mass e-mails. Secondly, it has been suggested that the ISPs should restrict the number of e-mails that a subscriber could send out in a single day. Some ISPs have introduced this but others have not so a spammer can easily transfer to one that has not put these restrictions into place. Some ISPs operate an anti-spam policy and you should contact yours to see what is available. Another option is to ban e-mails from senders who are not on your mailing list, this will guarantee the removal of spam but you risk missing e-mails from sources that may be important to you.

Alternatively, you can list e-mail addresses from which you will not accept e-mails.

Many e-mail packages allow the user to set up filters which automatically sort incoming e-mails, you specify the criteria the filter will use to kill unwanted e-mails. This is particularly useful in dealing with spam.

There are a number of programs available over the internet that will assist you in getting rid of spam, downloads are available at www.zdnet.co.uk/software

Examples are:

E-mail Remover (free) which runs under Windows and can save you the trouble of downloading unwanted e-mail. It connects to your ISP and retrieves e-mail header information letting you select the e-mail that you do not want to receive. It then deletes it from the server.

Spam Buster (shareware www.contactplus.com). This program will go a long way towards eliminating spam. You set the rules for detecting unwanted e-mail using the included list of known spam sources or typical spam cues, such as '' in the subject line.

You can add new spammers to the list or develop new rules to automatically detect unwanted messages. You can even filter e-mail from individuals. The software will check e-mails, save or purge the spams and notify the spammer and the domain administrator to cease mailings to your e-mail address.

A status log lets you know what the program has been doing.

Spam Killer (shareware www.spamkiller.com). Spam Killer works with Windows and filters your e-mails against a large list of known spam sources, subjects and headers.

The following are the main cautions that you can take against spam:

1 Take no action as by doing so you may miss an important e-mail.

2 be careful as to who you give your e-mail address to. When ordering goods on the internet do not tick the box that you would like information about other products.

3 E-mail the spammer and request to be removed from his/her mailing list.

4 Instruct your computer to only accept e-mails from those listed in your e-mail address book.

5 Use filters to restrict e-mails being sent to you.

6 Check if your ISP sells on e-mail addresses. If they do you may wish to change your ISP.

7 Contact your ISP and find out about their anti-spam policy.

Conclusion

Industry predictions are that spam will only get worse with time. However, rather than resigning your organisation to receiving more and more of it you should take action to see which of the facilities outlined above will reduce the amount that you are receiving.