Email Spam Is Doomed!

Winning the war on spam is a tough task, but the end for spam is near. It has been a long journey for me and the company that I co-own to get a grip on the spam battle that was being waged on our email accounts. I am happy to say that we have cut our spam count by 90% across the board.

The way that spam finds its way to ones inbox is often misunderstood. First of all spam will never be a problem if an email address is never published on the Internet or used to sign up for anything.In the beginning, when we first started our company we had our email address all over the place without realizing what the consequences would be. It didn't take too long before we were over whelmed with spam.

The proactive approach to freeing yourself of spam

Now that we had all this spam coming in what do we do? We couldn't just cancel the email accounts. We were getting a lot of legitimate emails. The first approach that we took was to change all mention of email addresses within a webpage to a link that would go to our contact page.

This page included an email form that people could fill out and click submit to send to our email.

This did two things: 1. Our email addresses were hidden and 2. it made it easier for visitors to email us, especially the ones that used web based accounts like "hotmail.com", "yahoo.com" "aol.com" etc...

The most successful thing we did was a process called filtering. The first time we experimented with this we made some mistakes and lost some business along the way. We were filtering too much. Even the legitimate emails were getting blocked. We eventually found a software called MailWasher (http://tts4.com/mailwasher1).

MailWasher allowed us to set very specific filters so that only true spam would get blocked. The beauty of it was that it let us see the spam before it downloaded to our computers and if we wanted to we could mark certain email as spam and allow the program to learn what to block.

The most important thing that we did to fight back on the spam was to utilize the reporting feature within the MailWasher application. This feature was great because it combined the community of users and investigated reports of spam abuse from all users.

If an offender was reported too many times they would be permanently blocked from the entire community. At this time the spam fighting community is growing bigger and bigger everyday and the amount of spam we get is shrinking more and more.

By: James Levisee

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