Anti Spam: Overview

Email spam is a real problem for many businesses. Here are some common issues:

1. Lost Productivity – If 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 which costs you money.
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. This opens you up to legal problems.
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. This slows down your IT systems.

Any of these issues on their own should be enough for you to install a good anti-spam filtered email service. At MBM we are encouraging all businesses to tackle email spam problems.  Call us to talk through how MBM can resolve these problems with our Anti-spam Filtered Email service on 01902 324494 or Email sales@mbmltd.co.uk

More About Anti-Spam Filtered Email

“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 they 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 guess your address – Domain names are listed on the Internet so getting hold of the bit of your address after the ‘@’ is easy but guessing the bit before the ‘@’ is more difficult. 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 eventually find it. Again, there’s relatively little you can do about this because you want people who look at your site and Email you.
3. Someone gave the spammer your address – You give out your Email address all the time ie when you register on a website, 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 website owners sell your address on to spammers. If you run (say) a popular scuba diving web site with 50,000 members, and perhaps you run it for free or maybe make a little bit of money from on-site advertising, if a spammer offers you a lot 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 Email spam?”  By subscribing to MBM’s Anti-spam Filtered Email 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 junk Email before it gets anywhere near you, your staff or your IT systems.

“Can you block ALL spam?”  The simple answer is 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 Anti-spam Filtered Email blocker works

Firstly, we have built our Anti-spam 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. Email spam filtering is a moving feast as techniques and practices are constantly evolving, but 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.

Item 3 is critical. There’s no point having a spam filter if it’s unreliable or it delays your important Emails. All our services, and our Anti-spam filtered email service in particular, are built around reliability. 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 simply 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 IT problem right away.

How to sign up

If you want to know more, call us. We don’t have sales people so you’ll speak to a friendly technician 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.

Why not give us a call on 01902 324494 and let us solve your email spam problem for you?