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Email Spam: Client offers spam solution
Last year a business owner and client of mine was complaining about the huge number of spam they get at her medium sized professional services business. I was of no help to her but perhaps I can be to you. This is how she solved her problem - simply, thoroughly, at a very low $ cost. No more guessing who in the office should be blamed for attracting the ‘enlargers’ and ‘distant relatives mega inheritance from Nigeria’.
Her solution: she uses SpamArrest.
I came upon her solution quite by accident. I emailed her the announcement and link to my new blog and I received back the following email.
“Hi, it’s Julie Blogs (I’m protecting her identity), but you haven’t quite reach me yet. I’m protecting myself from receiving junk mail. Please follow the instructions from spamarrest to sucessfully send your email. It will only take 3 seconds and your mail will be released to me. Cheers, Julie”
How it works and what it costs
I clicked on the demo and learned all about how it works and the pricing.
Seems like a reasonable price to stop the big losses spam costs.
- productivity loss: we all have to plow through our Inbox more than once a day. Spam clogged Inboxes are place to avoid rather than look forward to
- workplace goodwill is diminished: aren’t we tired of the jokes on who is attracting the enlargersreturn from holiday
- return from vacation blues: ugh that clogged inbox awaits me when I get back Monday.
I saw Spam Arrest in action
Luckily I saw with my own two eyes how effectively it works and how friendly it is. I wasn’t put off my having to answer an email. It took only seconds and I was happy to help ‘Julie’ solve her spam problem.
So if you suffer from lots of spam, this appears like a viable solution. It works for ‘Julie’.
Time saved and office goodwill improved
From what I learned about spam when I was researching it directly, spam can cause lots of grief besides the obvious wasted time. We really don’t want to be unproductive. We want to get our jobs done and that means getting through our Inbox. Plus the ongoing in-office jokes about who was attracting all the ‘enlargers’ might be funny to start with, then moves to irritating and often beyond.
Arrest spam! Anybody have a different solution you want to tell us about?
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January 26th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Thanks for that Kath, I’m going to have to seriously consider it. Xtra is my current ISP, and back before their Yahoo mail, they were excellent at filtering spam. Now it’s a disaster. In fact, I can feel my shoulders sag when I open up my emails first thing in the morning. Twenty to thirty of those early morning emails will be spam, and many will be graphically unpleasant. Some days I diligently forward them to spamreport@xtra.co.nz but it makes no difference.
Trouble is, how can I be sure that the Spam Arrest email back to the original sender won’t go to THEIR spam folder? And there’s the time delay, particularly internationally, where they have to open up their emails and do the Spam Arrest stuff. I’d be solving a problem for myself but delaying my response time to my legitimate customers.
But thanks, Julie and Kath, for making me think about the subject more. There’s got to be a way stopping those darn spammers!
February 1st, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Hi Lesley
I might be the ‘Julie’ Kath talks about. I’ve used Spam Arrest for some years and LOVE it. Every day there are thousands (no, I don’t exaggerate) of junk mails caught in it.
At first I worried about the same issues you raise, but in fact it’s really easy to manage and I haven’t found the time factor to be an issue at all. I have a lot of international correspondence, we run a busy shopping cart, and there are often new people contacting me.
At first you need to keep an eye on the back end of your Spam Arrest account, for less net-savvy folk will hesitate to authorise themselves. At any time you can authorise a sender yourself - effectively you’re building your WhiteList, and it doesn’t matter whether they or you do the authorising. We found that within about two months we could just check it weekly and pick up the occasional person who hadn’t completed the process. As long as the sender always uses the same email address they’ll never have to authorise again.
Now one of my staff skims the unverified mail from time to time, and maybe we miss a few, but I’m satisfied that over 99% of the legitimate mail gets through.
Of course, if you’re expecting something, especially if it’s coming from an autoresponder, you can always jump in the back and let it through.
The other strategy we have is that my Office Manager doesn’t use it. I’ve got the catchall address pointed to my box and her email isn’t bandied about the web anything like as much as mine. Therefore her spam quota is much less than mine. Therefore, we have the orders from our shopping cart going to two addresses - hers as well as mine. This means that orders are seen by her as soon as she opens her Inbox.
Try it and see. I think they give you a free trial. I wouldn’t be without it now - it’s brilliant.
February 5th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Lesley - I’d consider adding a captcha to your contact form or a simple question such as “what is 2+2″ to verify the user is human…
I’d also recommend you encrypt your email address from harvesters using the enkoder (http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/form).
having a regular contact form without verification and your email address advertised in plain html is the #1 source of spam…