Stop Spam - 6 Things to Know to Slow the Flow
by Matt Berkley
Bad news for office workers fed up with those pesky emails cluttering up their inboxes; there is no 100% way to stop all SPAM.
It’s a fact, SPAM email has weaseled its way up the reliability scale enough to make it commensurate with death and taxes, but that doesn’t mean you have to take it sitting down.
“There is really no sure fire way to stop all SPAM,” says Gene Goertz, service manager for Telsar Computer and LAN Services, Inc. “But there are programs that will drastically reduce it.”
Welcome to the battle. Here are a few tips to help you get started:
Install A Filter. “Where there is a problem, there are always solutions,” says Elizabeth Niedringhaus, president of SSE. One option is to deploy a SPAM filter that automatically blocks the first inbound email from a new sender. The new sender receives an automated reply from the intended recipient, requesting that the user click a link to be automatically added to the approved inbound senders list. This approach effectively blocks all automated SPAM, which represents 99.9% of all SPAM today. On the other hand, valid human senders are inconvenienced during the first inbound message; however, all future messages pass through with no intervention.
Return To Sender. It should go without saying that you should never respond to SPAM messages, even if it’s to demand you be taken off their contact list. By responding, you’re only letting them know you actually exist.
What’s In A Name? “Plenty,” says Victor Mattison, president of Access US. Mattison explains that a lot of the time SPAM happens passively. Spammers will stage attacks on domains, blanketing them with every name they can. “As a spammer,” he states, “the cost for me to do this is virtually nothing. I can send out a billion messages and maybe 75% are bad, but 25% get through.” A quick fix is to steer away from establishing email addresses that are predictable/easy to target—i.e. john@acme.com.
Redirect The Problem. Niedringhaus says that a traditional approach is to combine several traditional SPAM-blocking techniques, including artificial intelligence to enable a system to dynamically learn what is SPAM and what is not. “This works well,” she says, “and can stop between 70%-90% of SPAM, with the system becoming ‘more intelligent’ with experience. Not all blocked messages are deleted immediately; rather they are deposited in a folder under the user’s inbox and labeled SPAM. This folder always contains the most recent week of email that has been identified as SPAM. This allows the end-user to periodically check the folder in order to identify any false positives. Simply replying to any false positive automatically adds the original sender to the approved inbound sender’s list. Each week the system automatically purges SPAM older than seven days.”
Change Your Ways. Mattison notes that a great deal of the SPAM is a result of an employee’s online behavior. Email info becomes compromised when people use their work accounts to sign up for news alerts, mailing lists, or go onto websites and use their address to forward an article to a friend. To stop the SPAM, asserts Mattison, business owners need to curtail this behavior. “One idea a business could use is to set up an environment where employees don’t use their work email for anything personal. Set up secondary accounts.”
Know Your Foe. According to Goertz, spammers are constantly finding new tricks. Accordingly, your anti-SPAM software must be updated to keep up with new developments as they happen. “The business owner must stay current with the reviews of the SPAM blockers. They are getting more sophisticated all the time. But so are the spammers.”
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