Friday the 13^th, 2009

SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM...

Are you & your staff inundated with SPAM?  Who's sending it & how can you block it?  Who's sending it... every e-marketing company on the planet that's been able to glean e-mail addresses to your company. 

Blocking it is a much more involved process & you can't hope to block it all.  Bottom line, there's no short answer to resolving the problem, or single product that's going to be employed to address the flood "spammers" that send you & your staff unsolicited information.  If there was, the resolution would already have been employed.

If your office is fortunate enough to afford a dedicated IT staff, they'd be able to research various products in the marketplace & implement them.  Unfortunately, few small to medium sized businesses have that luxury.  So what do you do?

 Should you decide to go it alone & host your own e-mail server, look into Spam Assassin http://www.spamassasin.com/, AppRiver http://www.appriver.com/, Anti-Spam Guard http://www.antispamguard.com/ & a variety of other products available in the marketplace.  Running combinations of these products will definitely start you in the right direction.  Cost will dictate what you employ & ultimately the results you'll achieve.  Utilizing these & other products in combination, however, is dependent upon how tenacious your IT department is in "training" your system to identify SPAM, versus the e-mails you & your staff want to receive.  It's never going to be 100%, so make sure that you have realistic expectations regardless of the solution(s) you choose.

If you don't have the luxury of employing a full-time IT department, talk to your local network services provider.  Computer Rescue for example employs not less than 17 different SPAM filters for our customers who use us as their e-mail service provider.  We're able to eliminate 80% or better of the SPAM that our clients receive by "scoring" each message received to determine whether or not it's SPAM.  That buy's you & your staff quite a bit more time to service customers.    

We all know that we're spending too much time reviewing & deleting unwanted e-mail.  While there's no perfect solutions to the problem, some action is better than none.