AntiSpam Guide
Is your junk mail folder turning into your inbox?
from: Nathan Kully
Remember the days when your inbox seemed like a constant influx of spam and other sorts of junk mail? Every day your inbox filled up with the most useless messages ranging from "Congratulations!!! You've just won $1,000,000" to "Want to enhance your...." It got to the point where your inbox was a spam folder and that the junk was increasing exponentially every day.
The solution to this issue was of course to make a spam or "junk" folder that would save us all the trouble of sorting through 300+ messages every day to dig out what was actually useful. However, are people so determined to prevent spam that they are deleting useful messages as well?
When someone opens a new email account, one of the first preferences they set is how strong their spam filter is. In Outlook, people have the option to set the filter anywhere from no filtering at all to completely deleting potential spam files before they even reach the junk box. Since spam emails have been increasing at such a rapid rate, people are cranking up the filter so they have zero chance of even seeing the headers of spam emails in their inbox. The problem with this is that legitimate emails with questionable subjects are immediately deleted or get thrown in with the spam to be forgotten about.
Recently, while glancing through my junk folder and I noticed an email from my boss that was addressed only to me. This would not be such a shock if my spam filter was turned way up, however it was set to "filter the most obvious junk emails".
If general emails from my boss are considered obvious junk emails, does that mean that heavy spam filters consider everything spam? It seems that time has reversed itself, such that instead of our spam filling our inboxes, our useful messages are filling our spam boxes. This now makes our junk folders our new inboxes.
The junk mail folder was designed to make life easier for consumers, but for businesses, turning junk mail or spam filters up too high can be very costly. The Cobb School District in Atlanta was looking for a new phone service for the district and was listening to offers from multiple phone companies. Because their spam filter was turned up so high, they never received the email from the cheapest company, in turn costing them $250,000. They suspect that the email was thrown into the spam folder because of the phrase "long distance" in the title, which can be associated with pornographic material (1).
With the degree of filtering these days there is simply no way to guarantee that a message will reach someone's inbox instead of their spam box. There isn't much we can do about spam sent to us. We can improve the chances of an email reaching our recipient's inbox by sending it in a more secure fashion.
If it were possible to guarantee our email's delivery, then every day 300+ spam messages would avoid our spam boxes and appear in our inboxes. Since this idea is not yet completely plausible, we have to focus on other tactics like email encryption.
The main purpose of email encryption is to protect a message from point A to point B without interference, but it also gives it a better chance of ending up in the inbox folder because the recipient presumably has the same encryption program. If each has the same encryption program the message is in a recognizable format that the inbox will identify over a generic email that could be spam.
Another level to help ensure that your recipient gets his or her email is to use authentication tools. Authentication is the process of verifying someone's digital identity.
Today, people are so afraid of recognizing, especially opening a potential spam message that they would rather overprotect themselves at the expense of losing their own mail than allow a single spam message to reach their inbox. One day we will be able to open our inboxes without worrying about spam, but for now we need to do the best we can to receive the files we want while getting rid of the ones we don't.
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End Notes 1) Whitt, Richard. "Low bid lost in the e-mail." The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 23 May, 2006. http://www.ajc.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/today/news _4427e925730bd03100ea.html
About the author:
Nathan Kully is an employee at Essential Security Software, Inc., a provider of email and document security solutions for small businesses and accounting professionals, in Bellevue, WA. He is also a contributing editor to the The Techknowbizzle.com. Nathan is currently a student at Cornel
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