Driving Your IT Costs Down

Do you feel that you are still receiving too much spam? 

The first action to take is to review your spam filtering.

Let Your Mail Provider do the Work

A large number of people still have their main spam filter operating on their PC in conjuction with their mail client, eg. Outlook.  This is now not usually the best approach.   Most Mail Providers (usually your website hosting company) can apply a spam filter and virus check any mail attachments before the mail ever reaches you. Each day you will receive a single email detailing any spam which has been detected and quaranteened.  There is usually enough info there for you to assess if it is indeed spam.  If you see a mail which has been wrongly classed as spam you can retrieve it into your normal mail box.

White Lists and Black Lists

In conjuction with the above you should be be able to create ‘White Lists’ and ‘Black Lists’.  If the spam system incorrectly traps a ligitimate email you simply enter the senders email address in the ‘White List’ and it will never be treated as spam again.  Similarly if you consistantly receive spam from the same sender you can add their email address to the ‘Black List’ which will ensure it is always blocked.  Note, seasoned spammers continually change their ‘email’ address so this can have limited effect.  Your Mail Server Host uses additional advanced techniques to detect spam.

How to Set This Up

So, log on to your ISP account and go to your email settings.  Note that you may not be able to adjust these settings from your web-mail console where you can view/collect your mail.  You may have to log on to your general hosting account.  

Important Tip – Unsubscribe

Try unsubscribing if you are given the option. Check the bottom of a spam email and if there is an option to un-susbscribe try it.   Although many spam email sources use somewhat questionable means to obtain your email address many of them also realise that if you are not interested you will simply block it so do provide a ligitimate means of unsubscribing.  (it is often said that by doing this you are confirming a ligitimate email address but seasoned spammers don’t care about this they will keep bombarding you anyway so always best to try and unsubscribe if you can).

Further Steps to Minimise Spam

In addition there are a number of steps you can take to minimise spam going forward;

• Only give out your personal business email address to clients and people you wish to contact. Eg your.name@mycompany.co.uk
• Have a seperate general email address for your company. Eg info or enquiries@mycompany.co.uk
• You need to decide whither you put your personal or general email address on your personal business card
• Have a non-personal email address which you use to subscribe to websites etc. Eg isubs1@mycompany.co.uk
• Have a 2nd non-personal email address which you give to sources that you may have misgivings about but you still want give them an address, perhaps a mailing list that you have not heard of before but looks interesting. Eg isubs2@mycompany.co.uk
• If possible keep a note of what people/organisations/websites you give out the email to on a spreadsheet.  You can also combine this with a note of associated website password and user names.

In practice you arrange to have all the mail addresses re-directed to your main email address (but the sender will never know this). Why do this?  If spam becocomes a problem on a partivular address you can cancel it without affecting the others.  It also lets you know which address has been passed to the spammers.  Note – sometimes websites get hacked for the sole purpose of ‘stealing’ the subscriber list so your email address may not have been deliberately passed on

If you want to find out more or need any help with the above contact Computer Business Services who will be only too happy to advise.