Email and Spam Management

Email has become as essential as the telephone in today's business world. However, email comes with a hidden price. Junk email, or "Spam" has become a major problem, and one recent estimate places the amount of spam at 60% of all email messages in January, 2004. The percentage may climb as high as 80% by the end of 2004.

Every business using email today needs a good email filtering strategy. The amount of spam received by individual email users within the same office can vary tremendously, depending on the individual's internet habits, the length of time an individual email address has been in use, and whether the email address is posted on a website.

If everyone in your office typically receives only a few spam messages a day, consider yourselves lucky. You probably only need to set up a "Rule" in your email application so that spam is sent to your "Deleted Items" or "Trash" folder as soon as it arrives. If you need help doing this, Web Wranglers is ready to help!

If you or anyone in your office receives more that a few spam messages a day, you probably want a more aggressive spam filtering solution. Web Wranglers has extensive experience identifying and configuring spam filters. For example, all of our hosting accounts feature SpamAssassin at no extra cost. SpamAssassin requires some configuration; if you need help doing this Web Wranglers offers SpamAssassin help at no charge to its hosting customers.

SpamAssassin does not delete spam, and it does not stop spam from reaching your inbox. SpamAssassin does identify spam and rewrites the "Subject" line, which makes it easier and faster for the user to review. After using SpamAssassin for some time, you will likely be able to ignore the messages it identifies, since it rarely gives a "false positive" (valid email mistakenly identified as spam).

If you need more aggressive spam filtering, Web Wranglers can set up Spam Soap, a service that sends all mail identified as spam to an email account set up specifically to receive the spam. There are monthly fees associated with this service, but it is very reliable since it is monitored by humans who can adjust its filtering parameters when necessary. You must have your own domain name to use Spam Soap.

Strategies exist to minimize the amount of spam you get without using any filtering. To take the best advantage of these strategies, you should have your own domain name. Web Wranglers can help you with obtaining a domain name and setting up hosting so that your email and spam filtering strategy is customized for your business.

No matter what volume of spam you receive at your business, Web Wranglers is ready to help you deal with the growing volume of this irritating aspect of the Internet.