* Tips to avoid some of the onslaught
If you think you get more spam because you’re a small business, you’re right. Big companies have more resources to throw at the problem, but a recent study by an e-mail outsource vendor provides some hints to help you slow the spam.
MX Logic provides hosted e-mail filtering and security services for companies small and large. The company crunched the numbers of the spam going through its systems to 11,000 customers this past June and found that companies with under 1,000 employees received 14% more spam than larger companies.
Guess what? The CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) Act rules are being followed in less than 1% (.082%) of all e-mail messages today. Thank you, Congress.
Even if you believe your spam load has dropped, that isn’t true for the Internet. Three of four e-mails on the Internet are spam (74% according to the study). Worse, many of the top e-mail viruses and worms aggravating people in June have been around more than a year, meaning companies are not protecting themselves even against known threats.
One of the problems is that spammers are getting smarter and are now motivated by profit (they are criminals). Although it’s nice to see capitalism improve productivity again, I just wish it wasn’t the criminals getting more productive.
Scott Chasin, CTO for MX Logic, explained how even the smallest of companies can cut their e-mail problems. Some past advice for avoiding spam no longer works.
Remember the push to replace the easy mailto link on your Web pages from joe@company.com to “joe at company dot com” to fool the software spiders harvesting addresses? They figured that one out. If you want to keep harvesters from getting your e-mail addresses you need to display the addresses as a graphic rather than text. This means customers can’t click on the address and send you mail, unfortunately. However, a good option is to put a form on your Web site for messages so people can send a note directly without relying on e-mail. The form software can be added to your site with little programming, so check that out.
Human behavior being what it is, many small companies still struggle to train users not to click on attachments and links inside e-mails. Large companies can afford more filtering and security software to strip out attachments and deactivate links, but most small companies don’t have the budget or security expertise. Perhaps you should put a reminder Post It Note on everyone’s monitor about not loading attachments. Stick it right beside the note with their password so they’ll see it (OK, that’s a joke, but only for the two-thirds of the users who don’t have passwords on their monitor or under their keyboard).
Chasin reports a common problem with the company’s smaller customers: they forget to reboot after they update their operating system or security software. Microsoft forces a reboot on large updates, but often skips the mandatory reboot on smaller updates. Whenever you update your operating system you must reboot to put the updates into effect. The same goes for your security software: better to reboot after updates and be safe than be sorry because the updates you just received haven’t been activated.
I prefer a two-level spam filtering approach. The e-mail server should reject most of the spam, such as from known spam senders and messages with obvious routing errors common to spoofed messages. Each user should then have their own spam filtering in their e-mail software to fine tune the message flow based on their own tolerance. Thunderbird, the free e-mail client from Mozilla.org, does an excellent job. Microsoft’s Outlook and Outlook Express, which I recommend replacing, are at least getting better filtering and security support from Microsoft and outside vendors.
Obviously Chasin and MX Logic believe the hosted service approach serves customers best (that’s what they sell, after all). For companies without enough downstream bandwidth to their mail servers, such a service maximizes their bandwidth usage because MX Logic filters most of the spam and relays only good messages. Server-based spam and virus filtering programs work, but they have to examine every e-mail they receive. That means your server must chew through the three bad messages to get to the one good message, increasing the load on your server and your downstream bandwidth.
Services from MX Logic and others range from $1 to $3 per user per month. You may decide that cutting your e-mail traffic load by three-quarters by letting someone else filter the spam is a bargain at only pennies per day.
