Blogs

To recap from our most recent eblast, if you don’t know by now that SPAM is a huge time waster, turn off whatever spam filter you have and force yourself to read each email that comes into your inbox. The amount of email will be staggering.

We recently swapped to a different spam filter host and to be candid, we have changed our spam filters 4 times in the past year trying to find the best fit. Our current spam filter sends a daily email with all the spam that is “caught”. The spam report can be tailored to include all messages stopped or to only send messages that are somewhat questionable. We had a National Holiday on Monday May 30^th. For any of you who served or have family who served “thank you very much”. I would have not expected a large influx of messages on Memorial Day. I know weekends bring a much lower volume and on Saturday May 28^th, the report only showed six messages. However, on my daily spam report for Monday May 30^th I received over 22 messages that were marked as spam and 5 more that had virus attachments. This may seem like a low number but what is important to know is that I have turned off notifications of messages from foreign countries. The report will only alert me of messages that originate in the USA.

Do we really think that spammers took a weekend off but started working on a National Holiday? Does that sound strange to you? Well it does to me. The reason is simple. Spammers are sending messages through US based servers to try to bypass country origins.

The numbers above are what led me to this post. SPAM can be much more than messages in your inbox. It can be the cheapest and most widespread way of marketing on the internet today, depending on who is sending it. Most often, SPAM is intended to send you a message that will make you click a link in an email that sends you to some site to buy something. The spammers get paid by the click and the advertiser gets paid when you buy something. This is a win-win scenario for very low overhead.

Ask this question: If you could market to all of your target audience for less than 1/10 of penny per email address would you do it? I am not declaring you a spammer but I feel certain that all businesses would like to grow and expand, which means more clients. If you could reach all of your potential clients for less than all other marketing areas combined, you would be tempted.

SPAM is not a growing problem. SPAM is a mature, experienced problem with little to no long term solutions. Simply put – you need a spam filter.

The Top 3 reasons are as follows:

1. SPAM is targeted to you and will not go away. If you have an email address that is joe@aaapainting.com for a year and then you change to jsmith@aaapainting.com you will still get spam to joe@. The messages may not come through but once your name is on the list, it will stay on the list. We analyzed some of spam messages for old email addresses and we still get messages to an email address that we closed over 8 years ago.
2. SPAM is the single biggest contributor to the ransomware malware. Ransomware just like spam is a hot topic and more info can be found HERE.
3. Spammers will target your domain. Domains like Hotmail, Google, MSN and AOL have spam filters and they are built to help your personal email but they are not precise enough for a business domain such as @aaapaint.com. Spammers know that once you have someone at aaapaint.com they will start to send messages to admin@aaapaint.com or info@aaapaint.com in hopes that someone will check this email. Corporate level spam filters allow you to specify settings for spam within your domain and help control traffic.

In the month of May our spam filter caught over 16,000 messages. How many of these messages did you actually read? If you don’t have a spam filter for your domain, ask IRIS Solutions and we can help set you up.