Email Spam Overview

 

Email spam is a real problem for most businesses. You probably know all too well why spam is such a problem but here are common issues

 

1.       Lost ProductivityIf your staff have to deal with an Inbox full of junk Email each morning (and as a continuous stream throughout the day), that’s wasted time.

2.       Spam Content – Some of the content in spam Emails is inappropriate for the workplace. The last thing you need are staff members complaining to you (or their union representative) about inappropriate pictures appearing in their Inbox all the time.

3.       IT Infrastructure Costs – Each spam Email you receive consumes a piece of your IT infrastructure; a piece of disk space, processing time on your Email server and, of-course, capacity on your Internet connection.

 

Any of these issues on their own should be enough for you to install a good anti spam service but combined it’s no contest; you must tackle the spam problem… issue 1 costs you money, issue 2 opens you to legal problems and issue 3 slows down your IT systems! Call us to talk through how we can resolve these problems with our Filtered Email services or read on to hear more about these issues. Call on 01902 324494 or Email sales@mbmltd.co.uk

 

A Bit More Detail

 

“Why do I get spam?” We get asked this all the time. You receive unsolicited commercial Emails (to give spam its full title) because you have a working Email address and senders think you might buy things from them. They got hold of your address in any number of ways; here are a few possibilities…

 

1.       They guessed your address – Domain names are listed on the Internet so getting hold of the bit of your address after the ‘@’ is easy, guessing the bit before the ‘@’ is more difficult. The spammers often use a brute force approach; believe it or not, they send Emails to every name in the dictionary ‘@’ your domain so that if your addresses are like this, ‘john@mycompany.co.uk’ they’ll get your address straight away. You can’t easily change your Email addresses so there’s relatively little you can do about this. For new addresses, you might consider including the surname, for instance ‘john.stroszajn@mycompany.co.uk’ would be almost impossible to guess.

2.       Your address is on your web site – Spammers use programs that ‘crawl’ the web looking for Email addresses. If yours is on your web site then they will find it eventually. Again, there’s relatively little you can do about this because you want people who look at your site to be able to Email you.

3.       Someone gave the spammer your address – You give out your Email address all the time, this can be when you register on a web site, sign-up for a newsletter or even when you hand out your business card. It’s what people do with your address that’s important to you. Some web site owners sell your address on to spammers. It’s understandable, if you run (say) a popular scuba diving web site with 50,000 members, perhaps you run it for free or maybe make a little bit of money from on-site advertising and then a spammer offers you a load of money for your Email address list, you might be tempted to sell him the list. Other people aren’t as careful with your address as you are. Your Email address is a valuable commodity so be careful where you use it, especially your business Email address.

 

“How do I stop spam?” By subscribing to our service!  Once your address is on a spammer’s list you will never get off that list. You can’t Email them asking them politely to be removed, these people are criminals and don’t care about you at all. The best you can do is to choose a good spam blocking service (like ours) that will filter-out the vast majority of this junk Email before it gets anywhere near you, your staff or your IT systems.

 

“Can you block ALL spam?” Simple answer… no… no-one can. It’s not possible to block all spam because it’s a very subjective process; one man’s spam is another man’s informative newsletter. Our service uses every possible method to identify spam and block it but no mechanism is perfect. We provide industry-leading levels of protection.

 

“Don’t spams have viruses too?” Sometimes spam Emails include viruses too but we filter-out infected Emails as well.

 

How our spam blocker works

 

Firstly, we have built our Filtered Email service ourselves and we run it ourselves. It’s not a franchise; we’re not reselling someone else’s service… we run this service for our customers. It means that we control everything and can work closely with you. Spam filtering is a moving feast, techniques and practices are constantly evolving and we are able to adapt quickly to this changing landscape.

 

Secondly, we block spam out on the Internet not on-site at your business. This means that we remove the spam from your Email flow prior to it reaching your network giving a number of benefits…

 

1.       There’s no complicated software on your computers.

2.       No spam Emails clog-up your Email server or Internet connection.

3.       Our filters are on different continents on different networks and are extremely reliable. Your real Emails will always get through.

 

This last item is critical, there’s no point having a spam filter if it’s unreliable or it delays your important Emails. Our services generally, and this service in particular, are built around reliability. Yes spam is a problem but not getting your Email at all is a REAL PROBLEM.

 

Thirdly, we provide proper, real-world support. We are an IT services company; we have been looking after the IT support needs of businesses like yours for over 20 years. We understand what companies want from IT support so if you have a problem you call us and we’ll sort it out; no ticketing system, no overseas calls centre, no second or third line support, just skilled friendly people on the end of the phone who can fix your problem right away.

 

How to sign up

 

If you like what you see and want to know more, just call us. We don’t have any sales people so you’ll speak to a technician, you can explain the problem and we’ll give you a price. Our prices are cost effective, realistic and appropriate for the task in-hand. The pricing scheme is based on the number of Email users that you have; simply, that’s the number of individuals who will benefit from the service, not the number of domain names or the number of Email addresses… the number of people.

 

So, why not give us a call on 01902 324494 and let us solve this spam problem for you?