Q: I am so sick of all the spam that is sent to my
business email address. I spend an hour every morning just
trying to sort out the good email from the bad. I know I could
just delete it all, but I'm afraid I'll accidentally delete
email that might be important to my business. Short of unplugging
my computer, what's the best solution for dealing with spam?
A: I feel your pain. I, too, miss the good old days
when the only time you'd spend an hour dealing with spam was
trying to pry it out of the can.
Due to the nature of my business, I get a lot of unwanted
email. I've been working on the Internet since 1995 and my
email address has been publicly exposed for most of that time,
so I am a spammer's delight. It is no exaggeration to say
that I used to receive more than 400 email messages a day. Out
of those 400 messages about 10% were from people I knew, 10%
were from people I needed to know, and the rest were from
people that I would like to track down and field dress with
a very dull knife.
Spammers, they are called. the scourge of the Internet. the
digital kin of the lowly telemarketer and dreaded junk mailer.
After listening to me complain about spam for months, my lead
engineer burst into my office a few weeks ago and announced,
"I've solved our spam problem! I've installed a spam
filter on our server that will prevent spam from getting through."
Great, I thought, now I can find something new to complain
about.
I wondered what I would do with the extra two hours a day
this wonderful spam filter would give me. My joy quickly waned
when within a day my email went from 400 to 40. It was the
saddest day of my life. Sitting there staring at my empty
email box I suddenly felt very alone. At that moment I realized
that not only had I come to expect the morning deluge of email,
but I had come to find comfort in it. The spammers had become
my friends. They wanted me to get rich quick and brighten
my smile. They wanted to enhance my love life with generic
Viagra and give me great deals on miniature cameras, low interest
loans, waterfront property, and more. And the sheer number
of folks concerned about the abundance (or lack thereof) of
my anatomy was incredibly heart warming.
And the ladies that sent me email were so nice. They were
worried that I was lonely and offered to cure my loneliness
if only I gave them a credit card number. How sweet is that?
After a few days the withdrawal symptoms ceased and I was
happy to be free of the majority of the spam, though to this
day I'm afraid that I might be missing out on something grand.
You and I are not alone, Anna. According to a recent study
by eMarketer, the average Internet email user now receives
81 emails a day, and nearly one quarter of them are spam.
Spam now makes up more than 40% of all email and costs U.S.
companies more than $10 billion annually. Seventy-six billion
unsolicited e-mail messages will be delivered in 2003.
So how do spammers get your email address in the first place?
It's easier than you might think. While some spam comes as
a result of online purchases (yes, there are companies that
will sell your email address no matter what their privacy
policy says), that's just one of the ways spammers get you
in their sites.
Spammers use "spider software" to crawl the web
and harvest email address, so if you have a personal or company
website that has your email posted on it, sooner or later
a spam spider is going to grab your address and add it to
the mill. Likewise when you sign up to take online surveys
or receive email newsletters, you are potentially exposing
yourself to spammers.
How can you reduce the amount of spam you get? Many people
think that you can't fight spam, so you should just accept
it and move on. In other words, you can not fight the Borg,
so smile and be assimilated into the fold. While spam is hard
to eliminate, there are things you can do to lessen the amount
of spam you receive and it's impact on your daily business
life.
First, stop clicking on the "unsubscribe" links
at the bottom of spam emails. While some of the links are
valid and will get you removed from spammer's lists, other
are actually there just to let the spammer know that your
address is valid. Click the link to unsubscribe and you might
actually see the amount of spam you receive increase.
Second, it's a good idea to have at least two e-mail addresses.
Use one for personal or business use, and the other for surveys
and online purchases.
Third, consider installing a spam blocking software on your
computer or company network. There are a variety of spam blocking
applications on the market that range in price from free to
a hundred bucks. Though none of them will completely eliminate
spam, they can greatly reduce the volume you receive. Search
the Web for "spam filter" and investigate the ones
that you feel are right for you.
Your Internet Service Provider should also offer an anti-spam
application, but be careful how you use it. I have a client
who recently increased the sensitivity of their ISP spam blocker
to the point that nothing was getting delivered to their company
email accounts, including their own company newsletter. They
had effectively built an email brick wall that stopped the
spam and everything else. Not a good idea.
Before investing in a commercial spam blocker you might also
try adjusting the email filtering settings in your email software.
Microsoft Outlook, for example, lets you set rules for handling
incoming mail. The same is true with Outlook Express, Eudora,
and Apple's Mail OSX. Each have built-in filtering features
that can help eliminate unwanted email by parameters you set.
One thing to remember is that if spam didn't work, it would
quickly go away. In other words, if spammers weren't profiting
from sending unwanted emails they would go do something else.
Probably become a telemarketer or credit card debt collector.
Whether you use a commercial product or rely on your existing
email software to filter out spam, just be careful that you
don't batten down the hatches so tight that you no longer
receive any email at all.
