Tech life | Loosetalks | Can we kill spam?

Can we kill spam?

What is email-spam? We have spoken of it before, but let me repeat. An e-mail is spam if it is unsolicited and repetitive. Other notable features of spam mails are that they are not from any recognizable mail id so it is very difficult to track its origin. These mails do not provide opt-out options. And they keep landing in your mail box again and again. Ok to talk further. Why should we make so much fuss about spam? Can't we just delete spam mails and continue business. Why should spam hurt?

But the truth is spam does affect business. It has impact on your productivity and profits. Statistics estimate spam mails can be as high as 50% depending on the usage of the mail box. Bigger the company, more no of mail users = more spam.

Lets group e-mail users

Individuals

This group uses free mail ids like Yahoo, google, hotmail, etc. If your mail id is a free personal mail id then you need not worry about spam or stopping spam. Your ISP would have taken care of it from the server side. But the ISP also allows you to manipulate settings from your web mail account.

Small & medium size companies

There are a lot of small & medium sized companies who have a domain name. If you are a company who have a registered domain and have hosted your website, then you will have a hosting service provider. This service provider should take responsibility to filter spam, to some extent at least. He should allow you to modify and set your own customized filters from the control panel. Even with all this, having your own spam-controls surely helps.

Large companies

These companies have their own mail server. If you are a company with your own mail server then you have to have an anti-spam program in place.

If you are going to ask me does spam cost money and how much, it may be difficult to quantify. But let’s take an example, say you have a small company with 50 employees. A lot of spam mails are received daily and each employee spends 10 minutes on an average to identify the spam mails and delete them. So it's 500 minutes per day (approx 8 hours per day) and for one month it will be 250 hours or one man-month. If your average salary is Rs 20,000.00, you are actually loosing Rs. 20,000.00 per month.

Other than the above, you loose bandwidth, networks have congestions, you loose important mails and above all viruses get into your mail stream through spam mails. But why people spam? Why is it so widely used? Can it be stopped? How do spammers get mail ids? How is spam routed? Is there any law to prevent spam? There are many questions which arise. I will not talk on all these issues now. Those of you who want to know more, check out other write ups on iPOTT.

Lets concentrate on two questions 'can you reduce spam' & 'Can you kill spam?' Some tips to reduce spam:

When browsing the net do not give the company ID to any unreliable site.
Read privacy policy of websites before providing your mail IDs. Check if the website guarantees that the mail ids will not be sold.
Avoid posting your business mail ID on chat rooms, e-newsletters, newsgroups, contact lists etc. Programs called mail harvesters crawl the Web 'harvesting' mail IDs from such sources and putting these into spammers databases.
Never reply to spam. If you do so it confirms to the spammer that your mail ID is genuine. It is an invitation for more spam.
Never open spam mail - if it contains HTML code, it could again confirm to the spammer that you exist and are open to more spam.
When purchasing products on the web, you are usually asked if you want to be notified of additional products and services. Opt-out of these where not necessary.

Now how to control spam? It is a fact that it is not possible to solve the anti-spam problem with 100 percent efficiency. Some spam always gets through. But this should not stop you from deploying an anti-spam solution. There are plenty of market solutions which help stop spam. The solution may consist of hardware + software or it can be just a solution. The cost of the anti-spam solutions largely depends on the hardware component. More on the types of solutions available in my next write up. Keep reading.