Beat Spam to Increase Productivity

Spam continues to be a company´s biggest threat toproductivity with no signs of slowing down. Take a few measures to reduce its impact on organizational performance.

Recent studies have shown that spam is one of the biggest productivity killers that companies large or small must contend with.  The speed spam hits newly created mailboxes is stunning.  What was once considered a minor inconvenience has grown to be the corporate world’s biggest nightmare.  Even with all the fight spamming technology available on the market, about 80% of all incoming mail is still spam and the trend doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon.  Unfortunately the technology to send spam is not only getting better, but cheaper also, encouraging more spam artists to try their luck.  Spam costs businesses a fortune in lost productivity as employees have to take time out to delete email after email.

To defend against spam, protect your email address like it was a newborn. Create a Gmail based email and protect your corporate account at all costs.  Be very cautions where you fill out your information online, many companies can easily sell your information to others or give it to their own affiliates without permission.  There are email harvesting programs that spammers use to crawl through chat rooms, websites, forums, and company directories.  Avoid the @symbol to prevent it from being harvested.  The trick is to make your email readable only by human eyes.

The spammers are also very innovative, they can attack a company’s directory and run a combination of possible email names and stems blasting out millions of messages.  They don’t care if only a fraction get through since the entire system runs on auto-pilot.  It’s a good idea to get creative in choosing your email address, you can add a few variations to the standard methods.

Whenever you get spam, never respond, not even to the ‘opt out’ message.  Most companies nowadays circumvent the rules, the internet is very difficult to police.  Your request to opt out will only confirm you have a valid email address.  If they do get around to removing your name from their particular list, they will just turn around and sell it to other spammers too.  It’s very important to understand that these spammers all work together in a network sharing the latest and greatest spam systems to prey on unsuspecting consumers.

Most people already know they shouldn’t click on any links or download any files from spam emails, however they shouldn’t even open those emails altogether.  Spam artists can monitor and track the emails opened and then assume that it’s a live person.  Special tags in the file reveal someone has opened the mail.  Again, they recognize a hit has been made and can then sell your email as active account.

Invest in an anti-spam filter from Norton, AVG, McAffee or Symantec.  You can never completely eliminate spam, but you can drastically reduce its effects on productivity.  Exercise caution, new sales copy and techniques has spam emails becoming more and more personalized as if deriving from a familiar source.  Always be wary of emails that appear far too personal in nature.  Keep your guard up by implementing these strategies as a whole to keep productivity at manageable levels.

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