spam

15 years after the world united to crack down on spam emails, we’re still struggling with overloaded inboxes. All that unwanted email continues to flood the internet, much of it targeted to small businesses, and the impact goes wider than you might think. Here’s the full breakdown of how modern spam works and how it’s hurting your business.

What is spam? Generally speaking, spam is any unwanted message that lands in your email, comes via text, social media messaging, or other communication platforms. It might be sent to your main business account, eg your ‘contact us’ email, or directly to your employees. Most of the time, spam is annoying but relatively innocent messages from another business inviting you to buy/do/see something. They’re newsletters (!), reminders, invitations, sales pitches, etc. You may know the sender and have a previous relationship with them, or they might be a complete stranger. Occasionally, spam may even be part of a cyber attack.

Why you’re getting spammed. Maybe you or your employee signed up for a newsletter or bought a $1 raffle ticket to win a car. Perhaps you got onto the mailing list accidentally after enquiring about a product, not knowing that simply getting a brochure sent through would trigger a spam-avalanche. Often there’s fine print that says they’ll not only use your details to send you their marketing, but they’ll share your details with 3rd parties so they can send you messages too. That single email address can be passed around the internet like wildfire, and before you know it, you’re buried under spam. Sometimes, and more than we’d like to think, your details are found illicitly, perhaps through a hacked website for example, like the recent LinkedIn or Yahoo leak. More often though, your email is simply collected by a computer ‘scraping’ the internet – scouring forums and websites for plain text or linked emails and selling them as prime spam targets. It’s easy to see how individual office employees receive an average of 120 emails daily, over half of which are spam!

More than annoying. We all know spam is annoying, but did you know it’s also resource hungry? Your employees are spending hours each week sorting their email, assessing each one for relevance and deleting the spam. Too often, legitimate emails from clients and customers get caught up and are accidentally deleted. Add in the temptation to read the more interesting spam emails and productivity drops to zero. On the other side of the business, your email server might be dedicating storage and processing power to spam emails, occasionally to the point where inboxes get full and real mail is bouncing out. While most spam is simply an unwanted newsletter or sale notice, there’s also the risk that any links may be a cyber-attack in disguise. After all, one click is all it takes to open the door to viruses, ransomware, phishing or other security emergencies.

Spam is a HUGE vector for Infections. Past being just annoying and wasting your time, e-mail spam has become a very effective vector for spreading malware or otherwise stealing information. You may be aware that you shouldn’t open unsolicited attachments, but that is not the only way to cause problems. Lately, I have seen a lot of messages that contain no malware, and don’t even link to a virus. This way, they can’t even be caught by spam or virus scanners. What they do however is take you to a fake login site like Facebook or Google that then asks for your credentials to log in and see a shared document…These can look very convincing but DON’T FALL FOR IT!

How to stop the spam. The 2003 Can Spam Act (a global set of anti-spam laws) requires all marketers to follow certain rules, like not adding people to mailing lists without permission, and always including an ‘unsubscribe’ link. So firstly, make sure you’re not accidentally giving people permission to email you – check the fine print or privacy policy when you sign up for a service. Next, look for the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. If the message is from a reputable company (Amazon, Facebook, Little Dog Tech…), it is best to use this unsubscribe link rather than mark it as spam. Unfortunately, not all of them include the link, or they hide it somewhere impossible to see. In that case, mark it as spam! I practice this daily and as a result only 1 or 2 spam messages a day.

Some other advice for avoiding spam:

Business e-mail should NOT be a free service such as Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, or even Google. Not only are they not as secure as most businesses need, those are known domains and regularly attacked and spammed. If you set up a custom domain (like littledogtech.com), you are instantly creating an address that is completely unknown and new. Spammers can’t send mail to a domain they don’t know about! Setting up a custom domain is not as hard or expensive as it used to be.
Once you have that custom domain, format your business e-mail addresses to NOT have common names like ‘admin’ or ‘sales’ or ‘support’. These are easily guessed and added to lists. Also, include more than just the first name of your employees to make the address harder to guess. Use Robert.Johnson@company.com rather than bob@company.com.
Utilize a 3rd party mail filtering service to scan and categorize all mail for viruses or spammy content BEFORE it reaches your inbox. These systems can also filter out potential phishing messages by recognizing that something that may look like it is coming from a co-worker is not. Our clients that are on such a system enjoy GREATLY reduced spam in their inbox.

Most small businesses rely on email as their preferred form of communication. Either internally or externally to clients, customers and suppliers, email is the go-to format we’d be lost without. Our love affair with it is no surprise – it’s quick, simple and provides a paper trail. But its convenience doesn’t always mean relaxed. In fact, poor email communication can hurt your reputation and cost you customers. Here’s how to be smart with your business email:

Get a better e-mail service: Too often I see companies using e-mail addresses from gmail, yahoo, or even aol.com. Custom domains (the part after the @) are so common these days, that many consumers will interpret this as less professional than it could be. I believe that one of the first things a business should do is establish a solid brand, and with that comes an appropriate domain name, website, and e-mail. Believe it or not, it does not cost very much to own the rights to a custom domain, on the order of $10-$20 annually. You can register it (or we can do it for you) through any number of domain registrars, but our favorite is namecheap.com. Once you have that custom domain, you can use it to create an e-mail address that represents what you want your clients to see like yourname@, sales@, help@, or anything really. Finally, you need to choose a host for your e-mail. The domain registrars will often offer cheap or even free basic e-mail. That could be enough for some people, but we recommend a much more robust technology called “Microsoft Exchange”. In years past you would need to purchase and maintain an expensive server to have Exchange email. But, these days you can purchase a ‘hosted exchange’ inbox on a per month basis, for relatively low cost. We currently charge about $15/mo for this service. Once you have this Exchange mailbox, you can enjoy the benefits of real-time synchronized email, calendar, and contacts between all of your devices, sharing with other members of your domain, and even spam filtering that is much more effective and secure than what you get with free services such as Gmail.

Manage your inbox: Your inbox is only for items you still need to access. Once you’re finished with an email, you should delete it or archive it. If you were to imagine your inbox as physical letters, you’d never let it grow to a 6-foot high stack of chaos. Instead, you’d either throw them out or do the filing. It’s not hard to identify which ones to keep for reference, so create inbox folders to sort them accordingly. As emails arrive and are actioned, move them to the relevant folder or the delete bin. Certain email systems such as POP and IMAP can really choke when your inbox gets too large, so better systems such as Microsoft Exchange can really be a benefit here.

Write professional messages: Stepping across the line from casual to careless is easy if you skip the basic elements of good business writing. Grammar will always be important and the sentence structure of your language hasn’t changed. All email programs include a spell-checker, many of which draw attention to errors immediately, so there’s really no excuse. Typing in all CAPS is seen as yelling, and breaking your text into paragraphs makes your message so much more readable. One last thing before you click send, quickly glance over your email to make sure your tone is appropriate and no mistakes have snuck through.

Embrace the subject line: Many emails are missed because the subject line was empty or meant nothing to the receiver. Writing these attention-grabbing nuggets can be tricky, but if you simply summarize the message, you’ll do fine. Just remember to keep them under 5-8 words so they fit on mobile displays.

Be smart with attachments: Keep attachments small – under 2MB – as they can clog up the email server. For larger attachments, share the file location as a link using cloud storage. When you’re sent an attachment you’d like to keep, save the file and then delete the email. And as always, be careful with unexpected attachments, especially from unknown senders. It’s more important than ever to scan all attachments with an antivirus before opening. Here is another situation when Microsoft Exchange can really benefit you. With Exchange you usually have the ability to send and receive much larger attachments, and even have them scanned for viruses or suspicious attachments BEFORE they reach your computer.

Keep your CC/BCC under control: The carbon copy (CC) and blind carbon copy (BCC) let you send the email to additional stakeholders, more as an FYI than anything else. As a rule, use BCC if you’re using an email list or privacy is an issue. But before you add extra people to the email, make sure the email IS relevant to them. There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a pointless email chain!

Call us at 515-422-1995 for help with your business email.

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