Help Eliminate Unsolicited Commercial Email (Spam)
Just imagine getting an extra two or three thousand emails a month. These might contain viruses, sexually explicit material or be fraudulent. Think of the amount of time needed to simply delete these messages much less try and figure out whether or not they are legitimate. Email is one of the most important productivity tools to come along in the last 15 years and it is slowly being undermined and rendered very hard to use by those who insist on sending unsolicited commercial email to millions of addresses at virtually no cost to the sender. The cost is being assumed by the receiver and our company is tired of incurring that cost.
Internet service providers, in a good faith effort to reduce the problem, are trying all sorts of techniques to stop the spread of Spam. Almost universally they resort to filtering techniques that sound cool but offer little real hope of success. In many cases they implement these filtering techniques without informing their customers and guess what happens? All of a sudden their customers quit getting email from legitimate sources they used to receive without a hitch. When customers complain they are told to turn off the filtering that had never been requested in the first place. Our company got hit by this and it cost us some business.
Internet service providers also subscribe to "blacklists" of mail servers that have been known to send Spam. Any mail sent from these servers is automatically deleted. Of course they can't really exclude all servers because half the nation uses AOL servers and all of these are known to send Spam.
So in addition to the incredible amount of Spam the ISP's are increasing the problem by using ineffective techniques and reacting in a knee jerk fashion instead of analyzing the situation. ISP's have no business filtering ANYTHING sent to our company regardless of the subject or whether or not their filters tell them is Spam or not. All email should be delivered to the recipient without exception and it is hard to believe there hasn't been a public outcry denouncing arbitrary filtration put in place by ISP's.
Of course this puts the burden of dealing with Spam completely on the receiver where it belongs. Many users will choose to filter using similar techniques to the ISP's and many more will choose to set up custom filters that will help in their specific situation or business. The problem is that filters are not reliable and can be worked around with ease. In addition filters must be maintained. Someone has to add new filters and try to plug holes found everyday by spammers. It takes just as much time to maintain filters as it does to deal with Spam every day if you have a high volume of email.
Our company uses both filters and other much more effective techniques (more on this later). Several weeks ago we stopped receiving email from one of our critical vendors. In other words we were not getting daily reports that are critical to our business. It turns out we had received an "update" from our filter software vendor and now these emails were being blocked because of a new filter. It was easy to recover once we knew what was happening but we lost several days and missed many deadlines with our customers. Needless to say we will be removing this software in the near future.
So what works to eliminate Spam? How do we deal with the situation since most of our business is conducted via email? We use a challenge/response system that in most cases completely eliminates Spam with virtually no maintenance whatsoever. There is a lot of discussion about challenge/response and how it has flaws just like every other Spam elimination method. Our experience is different. We find it eliminates 99.999% of Spam with no effort on our part. Rather than go into great detail about how it works there are links below for two C/R systems that we have used and are using now. These guys explain it much better than I can. You should base your decision on your particular needs. If you have little Spam then a C/R system is probably overkill and simple filtration will work for you. If you have lots of Spam like we do then a C/R system will make your life much easier.
The thing to remember is that a little Spam today will equal lots of Spam next year. Until the spammers messages quit being delivered the total will increase by huge percentages each year. If everyone used a C/R system the problem would go away completely. We urge you to investigate this technology and embrace it as a way to keep email the productive tool it should be.
Dale
YourInformationSource.Com
