World-wide SPAM volume has increased dramatically in September; estimates are around 30-45% increase in traffic. We have spent a lot of time working with clients to reduce the effect of this uptick as much as possible, and Phase 2 is now actually blocking in excess of 90% of the email traffic it receives on a daily basis.
There are things that everyone can do to minimize the amount of SPAM that you receive. See below for the 3 most common situations and some recommendations:
1. NEVER provide your work [or primary] email address to ANY online website -Often times this will add your email address into the corporate direct email marketing campaign list. These emails, because they have your exact email address, are likely to pass through any SPAM filters. With a few precautions you can greatly reduce or eliminate this sort of SPAM:
o NEVER use your work email address when creating accounts on the internet. It is always better to use a “junk” email address that can be created for free at yahoo, gmail or many others.
o These messages, due to recent U.S. legislation, are required to have an option at the bottom of the message for a single-click unsubscribe. It well worth your time to scroll to the bottom of the page and select this option.
2. Distribution lists and group mailboxes -Many customers have configured corporate distribution lists and mailboxes. This works well to distribute information quickly but you must understand that SPAMMERS often exploit this capability. Once your domain [xyzcorp.com] is learned it is very easy to simply guess at what the standard distribution list may be. Some typical examples of this are admin@…, sales@…, info@…, marketing@…
If distribution lists are required: instead of sending these messages to 5 or 10 people, a better solution is to have the mail sent directly to a single mailbox, and give multiple persons access. Just understand that a lot of SPAM will be sent here and the vast majority of the mail sent here will need to be weeded through to find valid messages.
3. Website email addresses -A favorite target for SPAM is by using a web crawler to search through websites gathering any email addresses from websites. The best practice for including email addresses on websites is to ensure that this is text only, without any links. Do not link the email addresses, this will greatly reduce the effectiveness of this sort of SPAM.
