I hear it all the time:
“I’ve started getting all kinds of spam and junk in my mail box through the email program. I SWEAR I haven’t been surfing porn sites.”
Although there are many ways that someone could be added to a spam list, when customers are insistent that they haven’t used a given email account for anything unusual, the cause is usually not their fault, but rather someone else’s fault that they know. Simply put, someone that had the victims address information in their address book probably got hit with a virus that was maliciously programmed to read and send back their entire address book. And once the victim got on one spam list, they can get passed out to other lists quickly… Pretty soon they are getting tons of spam by the hour.
So, I tell them they did nothing more than communicate with someone who was careless with their email and computer usage.
This further enforces the point that it’s very important to have two email accounts: one for personal use – that you use to place online orders, add your self to mailing lists, and give to family and friends to use… Basically an account that you don’t mind cleaning out junk when it comes in (since it’s not interfering with business). And a second account that is your business email account that you pass out to business associates, clients and customers.
Typically, businesses have a higher level of security filtering in their email/network systems, and therefore will help to keep employees from opening, or ever getting, an email with a virus attached. So, although it can still happen, business related email is usually kept cleaner and less likely to get picked up by a virus, and therefore safer to associate your yourself with.
Remember to keep your personal and business email sacredly separated as much as possible, meaning: don’t accidentally send an email to a family member using your business email. As soon as you do, their email client (outlook, for example) will retain that emailaddress, even if that address isn’t in their address book, it’s gets added to the email client cache, which can also be read by a virus. An example of this is when you go to add a person to an email and start to type the persons name into the ‘to’ field, it pre-populates the name from cache or your address book as you type. This pre-populating effect is the same way that a virus can collect all of the email accounts that you communicate with.
There are four solutions: The first is to turn on spam filtering on the email client. The second is to add spam rules to the email client to help catch instances of spam that are coming in. The third is to add a filter app at the server level – like Spam Assassin. We can adjust the sensitivity to the filter algorithm that determines spam vs. good email. The fourth solution is to change your email account.
Hope this helps to clarify.
Popularity: 3% [?]
