There are approximately 182.9 billion emails sent every day, and sometimes it feels like they have all arrived in your inbox. Unfortunately many of those messages will be unsolicited marketing spam trying to sell unwanted goods, phish for credit card details, or even (as previously reported) posing a serious security threat to your company.
The keys to keeping secure control of your mailbox are three measures, as below, which you should deploy to reduce the amount of junk that can potentially get through to being read.
1. Use your built-in spam filters
Most email applications like Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail offer native spam filtering as standard. In fact, they should already be capturing many unwanted messages and placing them in a “Spam” folder automatically.
The spam filter is can generally be adjusted to apply stricter rules if required, so if you find that lots of unwanted mail is still arriving in your mailbox, try increasing the filtering levels. You can also help improve your spam filter by reporting unwanted messages so that similar emails are auto-filtered in future.
You can read more about how the spam reporting process works in Microsoft Outlook here.
Instruction on adjusting the spam filter for Apple Mail can be found here.
2. Take advantage of third party services
One of the most effective methods for fighting spam is to block it before it arrives on your company network or mail server. Using intelligent filtering rules, all of your incoming email is scanned for the tell-tale signs of spam, so that unwanted messages are blocked early.
Email scanning can be quite resource intensive, particularly where your business receives thousands of messages an hour. However, some scanning tools can impair the performance of your mail server, reducing productivity so much that the security and convenience benefits are outweighed.
Here at Broadband Cloud Solutions we offer a Cloud-hosted email filtering service capable of scanning a huge volume of incoming messages. The scalable nature of the Cloud means that we can add resources whenever required so that performance is never impaired. And our list of spam-identifying rules is constantly updated to main accuracy and effectiveness.
3. Treat your email address as the valuable resource it really is
Every time you fill in a form on a website, your email address is added to a mailing list. Which means that you will open yourself up to receiving newsletters and marketing emails – and unless they explicitly state otherwise, you could find your details are available not only to the site owner, but also any third-party marketers or SEO data engines they have deals with, potentially inviting a lot of unsought junk mail.
In the same way you don’t give out your home phone number to everyone who asks, you should carefully consider the trade-off before handing over your email address.
If you’re not interested in reading every single missive they send out, consider setting up a ‘ghost’ alternative email address – for example, MyNameSpam@domain.com or similar – which will then receive all those messages. You can then leave this mailbox to do its own thing, reviewing occasionally to ensure nothing has been missed, and deleting the contents periodically to free up wasted space.
These are three effective methods for reducing the volume of junk that lands in your inbox. If you need further help or guidance, please get in touch with our expert team today.
Leave a Reply
