Tips on Using Spam Blockers for Business Email Inboxes

Commercial spam, phishing, unsolicited advertisements and scams inundate email inboxes everyday. Spam filters try hard to keep up, but the truth is, even with the very best filters and blockers, you will still end up with some unwanted email in your inbox, and legitimate emails you did want will be lost forever. This is going to continue, as long as people still purchase, click, or sign up for things received through unsolicited emails.

The spammers aren't stupid - you may think that everyone knows how spam works, and that people aren't really buying things from spammers, but if a spammer send out 10,000 emails and only 1% click or respond, they're still getting 100 sales or responses - and for what? For about 1 minute worth of work to click on their automated sending software they have, and about another minute worth of work to harvest email addresses from anywhere they can find them. As long as people still click or buy, the spam will continue.

So the response from the consumer to stop this type of advertising, which is not regulated by fair trade practices required of other advertisers in the United States, companies have developed software to help you have better control over your inbox. For a short time, these new software programs actually helped - unwanted spam was block, and life was good - and then the spammers adjusted.

Now, the spammers alter headers, so that the emails look as though they come from legitimate domains, and from real people. In fact, if you respond to many of these emails, you find that your response will be sent back to the faked address, and a real person, at a real email address, will receive your email - but they never sent anything to you.

What this has done is resulted in legitimate businesses having their domains and IPs blocked from many major ISP and email providers, when, in fact, they have done nothing wrong. Additionally, if you blacklist them in your anti-spam software, you can never receive messages from them again. Now, for a regular internet user, this poses very little problem, because chances are you will never have a need to receive an email from many of these domains and email addresses that were spoofed.

However, the same can't be said for businesses. I operate a business website, several of them, in fact, and I spend a large percentage of my working time sorting through literally thousands of emails per day trying to scan email subject lines to make sure I don't delete something legitimate.

When I first started my business, I used an awesome spam trapper box, and I was able to blacklist every spam email, and the amount of spam I was receiving daily decreased significantly, and I was very pleased, until one day, I received an email from a Yahoo! address.

This email stated that a potential client for my business had seen my website, really liked my portfolio, and was very interested in my services, but she had been unable to send me any email to request a quote because it kept bouncing back saying she was blacklisted due to spam.

This prompted me to go into my blacklist queue of my email spam trapper, where I found not only her emails she had said she had sent, but five other potential customers who had requested quotes too, and all of them had been blacklisted. That caused me to go look in my spam filter settings, and I found the reason why they were blacklisted: each one had had their domain blacklisted, because my spam trapper had received Viagra, Cialis, and home mortgage spam emails from their domains.

Now, these people had not sent me these emails, but somehow, their domain had been spoofed, and I realized that I had lost four potential clients due to my spam box trapper. Because of this, I began checking each and every blacklisted email every day, but the problem with that was that it actually took longer to check every spam trapped email and sort through them and adjust the settings than it would have taken to just delete the spam email when it came in the first time.

So I stopped using my spam box trapper, and began looking for some other software to help control what could only be called a spam epidemic. Unfortunately, even the very best ones I found, which scanned for % of spam keywords in the email before deleting or blacklisting them, still allowed a large percentage of spam emails through and still blocked a large percentage of legitimate emails too.

Spammers aren't stupid, remember? So when spam blocker software searches keywords, the spammers send out not only text messages, but they are now sending out HTML and graphics messages. Graphics can't be scanned for keywords, and HTML code can pull images from a server elsewhere, without being able to be scanned as spam before it hits your inbox.

Consumers and businesses alike are suffering due to this spam. The cost to businesses is hard to determine, but there is a financial loss due to spam that results in rising costs of products and services to consumers. The only people getting rich off this spam fest are the spammers and the people who make the software to stop them. Conspiracy theorists might even tell you that the two are essentially in cohorts together to keep the cycle going. Whether that's true or not, the fact remains - spam costs you, me, and legitimate businesses money and time, and time is, after all, money.

There is only one way to stop the spammers in their tracks - be educated! Never, ever click on, purchase anything, or sign up for anything that comes from an unsolicited spam - ever! Why do the spams and scams work? Because consumers still fall for them, every day, thousands of them. The only way to stop spam is to make it unprofitable for people to spam.

Reporting the ISP or the domain from which the spam seems to have originated will do nothing to help, because most spammers don't spam from their own personal or business emails. Clicking on the link only confirms that their tactics worked, and confirms your email address, which makes your email more profitable when it gets added to a list and sold to another group of spammers. Responding to them to tell them they are spammers doesn't faze them one bit - you aren't going to hurt a spammer's feelings, they KNOW they are spamming. All you do by responding to them, again, is make your email address more profitable to them… you see, even if you don't buy their product or service, they can now turn around and sell their email lists, and they can verify your email is legitimate, because you responded to them, and all that's going to do is cause you to see an increase in spam in your inbox.

There is no active course of action we can take to stop the spammers except to stop letting them win. Don't buy from a spammer. Don't click on a spammer's link. Don't sign up for a newsletter from a spammer… it doesn't matter how interested you are in the subject or product.

If you like what they're offering, delete the email and search for a legitimate company who advertises properly and purchase or sign up with them. Don't give the spammers any ammunition, and if everyone in the world did this, the spammers wouldn't find it worth their time and trouble to spam anymore.

As long as consumers remain ignorant of these scam and spam tactics, the spammers will continue to get rich, for doing very little work, and our inboxes will continue to be besieged by an influx of unwanted, vulgar, unsolicited, or phishing emails.

Lastly, a word of warning - some spam, especially phishing spam, is dangerous. Never, ever click on a link in an unsolicited email and then provide any personal or financial or password information. If the email appears to have come from eBay, PayPal, your bank, or any other place, even if it's a place you recognize and do business with, never click the link on the email. Always open a new browser window and go directly to the site through your browser and verify whatever the email said that way. If still unsure, do not respond to the email you received. Instead, email the company you do business with, and ask them directly or forward them a copy of the email to see if it's legitimate.

Once again, spam and scams and phishing won't stop until the consumer and end user stops giving them ways to be profitable. Be knowledgeable, protect your personal information, and never support a spammer by clicking, signing up, or purchasing anything from an unsolicited email - ever.