SPAM! Lovely SPAM!

I Don’t Want ANY SPAM!

Anyone with an email account should be familiar with the term: SPAM. It seems to appear everywhere and is difficult to control. Research shows that 31 billion emails are sent out around the world on a daily basis, and 40 percent are labeled as SPAM. Some large corporations claim to receive over 25,000 SPAM emails a day. Presently, twenty-six states have anti-SPAM laws in place, but it still does not help with the problem. In fact, it is predicted that SPAM will increase by 63 percent before the year 2007.

Well, What Have You Got?

SPAM is not an acronym for anything. It is simply a metaphor for unsolicited email. Its name is derived from the canned meat product that most people view with a negative impression.

SPAM is actually an advertisement in an electronic message sent around the world in a matter of seconds. The subject of the message is always a catchy phrase to get the attention of the user and entice them to open the email. The email is then opened by the recipient with the expectation that the email is from one of their clients or vendors, when in reality, it is just an ad selling various types of products or services.

That’s Got SPAM In It!

Businesses today may not realize the impact that SPAM places upon their company. Research shows that SPAM accounts for 50 to 75 percent of the total emails in a user’s inbox. If a business is dependent upon email to promote a product or service, then SPAM becomes a liability. When a user is wasting their first hour of work every morning sorting through 100+ emails with only twenty of them actually being legitimate, the end result is a loss of income and productivity.

Have You Got Anything Without SPAM?

There are two ways to deal with SPAM: From the client end and the server end. Software installed on the local workstation is managed by the user. Client anti-SPAM works by utilizing a Blocked Sender list and filters out emails based on content, which could produce problems when the email is actually intended for the recipient.

At the server end, software is installed directly onto the mail server. This is far more manageable and allows the network administrators to handle the operations from a network perspective. The software can check with a Black List database, which is a list of known mass spammers that is constantly updated, and will block the email before being delivered to the end-user. It can also search for key phrases in the subject and body of the email like “Bad credit?”, “Get rich fast!”, “You're Pre-Approved!”, etc. This is by far the best solution for small to medium-size businesses, because it not only stops SPAM from reaching the mail server, but also saves valuable disk space.

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