The end of 2007 is vastly approaching and so is the realisation that by the end of it 50% of all our emails will be spam emails. In 2001 this figure stood at a mere 8% but with more and more of us using the Internet in our daily lives, whether it be for business or pleasure, spammers are finding more and more ways of infiltrating our inbox’s.

Spammers are costing British companies an estimated £5 billion a year as well as holding back the growth of the Internet as a business tool. Many employees are now spending up to an hour a day reading and deleting spam. The most common forms of spam email being:

• Product selling – usually pharmaceutical

• Religious movements

• Porn

• Chain letters

• Computer viruses

Obviously the best way to avoid spam is to stay off the spammers lists in the first place. To do this all staff should be encouraged to protect their company email address wherever it is possible to do so, this will reduce the chances of being targeted by spammers. A few ways in which this can be done is to avoid posting in newsgroups/discussion lists. These are one of the main sources for spammers to collect email addresses. Try not to get listed in online directories or chat rooms as your email address is likely to be harvested by spammers. If you do post on chat rooms, use a display name; do not use your email address. You can also remove @ from your email address when sending it to people via forums etc; you can replace it with at word ‘at.’ This will stop spammers harvesting your email address.

Businesses are always the worst affected by spam; it reduces employee productivity and drains networks resources as well as taking up bandwidth, meaning companies are wasting money on unproductive bandwidth everyday. Your businesses reputation could also be on the line if your computer network receives a virus that affects your outbound messages. This would mean that the virus would be sent to all the clients and other email address in your email account. You will also get more Spam if your company has a website as this is how most Spam finds its way to your email address.

Company reputations and personal reputations are on the line. Your business will lose money and revenue due to people having to filter through their emails to weed out useless Spam messages, calculating to millions of pounds per month.

With the use of a spam filter programme your business will have increased productivity, more bandwidth and of course more money. Decent spam filters block 99% of spam emails, with only 0.0003% of normal emails accidentally being blocked. Spam filters look for ‘buzz’ words such as Viagra and penis etc as well as filtering out images of a pornographic or unsuitable nature. Spam filters normally also come with virus engines to scan inbound and outbound messages; outbound message control means your companies reputation is protected so that you’re not spreading viruses to people in your email account.

Anti-spam filters are managed 24/7 and require no hardware, software, maintenance and bring no hassle. They could be the solution your business needs to win the fight against spam and allow you to get on with the more important things; the success of your business.