Anti Spam

Unfortunately, unwanted or unsolicited emails are part of the problem with having an email account these days. You are not alone, and it's not because you've signed up for something dodgy on the internet.

What is Spam?

Spam emails, also known as junk emails, are a subset of spam that involves senting almost identical message to numerous recipient via email, and has grown steadily since the early 1990's. Botnets (networks of virus-infected computers) are used to send about 80% of the world's spam, highlighting the need to ensure that antivirus protection on your computers is important.

How did they get my email address?

Spammers colelct email addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups and viruses which harvest user's address books, and are sold to other spammers. They also use a practice know as 'email-appending' or 'epending' in which they use known information about their target (such as postal address) to search for the target's email address. Therefore, much of spam is sent to invalid email addresses.

What can I do about it for my domain's emails?

There are several options available on the market, at varying costs. None of which can guarantee total removal of all spam, but may help as part of a multi-pronged attack.

• Install Anti-Spam package on your PCs

  Installing an antivirus or internet security package on your local PC is generally well advised, but the more expensive packages tend to include anti-spam measures. Each will tie-into popular email clients, such as Outlook, Outlook Express, etc and move emails that it thinks are spam to a designated folder. Then, you can skim through this folder, checking for any mistakes, and safely delete the lot when happy.

  Prices range anywhere from free to £50 a year, some packages cover multiple PCs.

• Apply Anti-Spam package at brhs

  You can choose to have a domain-level anti-spam package applied to your account at brhs.

  At £23.99 per year, per domain, this isn't the cheapest option, but one that will cover all email accounts at your domain name.

• Redirect your domain emails through a web-based email provider

  Only email hosting companies have an excellent (and free) spam policy and will filter all of your emails. This means that your emails will all be redirected to a single email address and, additionally, when you reply, you'll send your response from that email address and not from your domain name.

• Grin and bear it

  Once most people know that the spam isn't sent to them per-se, and appreciate that computers can send thousands of emails a second to list of made-up email addresses, it feels a lot less personal. Once this is understood, deleting the occasional piece of spam per day isn't too bad. However, for a business, this takes time and therefore costs money.