Is spam email getting you down?
- By Chief Editor
- Published 10 Mar 2008
Chief Editor
Experienced IT professional and frequent blogger with a special interest in technology, the internet, photography and motoring.
The Daily Telegraph is today reporting that "emails have gone from being a useful office tool to a curse that takes up huge amounts of work time".
The paper says that the average employee now sepnds an estimated 90 minutes to two hours per day wading through hundreds of email, much or which are spam.
So is email still a valuable business or social tool, or is the amount of emails selling pills, gender specific sexual organ enlargements and the like causing you to avoid your email box?
According to research group the Radicati Group, 196 billion email message are sent each day - and this is set to rise to 374 billion by 2011.
Speaking personally, I would estimate that 95% of the emails I receive are spam. And this is with spam blocking software installed. I shudder to think how may spam emails would get through to my inbox if there was no spam sieve installed on my email server.
So what can you do to reduce the amount or email spam you receive?
The paper says that the average employee now sepnds an estimated 90 minutes to two hours per day wading through hundreds of email, much or which are spam.
So is email still a valuable business or social tool, or is the amount of emails selling pills, gender specific sexual organ enlargements and the like causing you to avoid your email box?
According to research group the Radicati Group, 196 billion email message are sent each day - and this is set to rise to 374 billion by 2011.
Speaking personally, I would estimate that 95% of the emails I receive are spam. And this is with spam blocking software installed. I shudder to think how may spam emails would get through to my inbox if there was no spam sieve installed on my email server.
So what can you do to reduce the amount or email spam you receive?
- Do not open spam emails - this can alert the sender that your email address is a live email address.
- Do not click the "unsubscribe" link in a spam email - this will also confirm that your email address is live.
- Install some spam filtering software on your computer - Or preferably, on the email server. Spam blocking software on your computer will help to sift out email spam but installation in the email server will help stop the spam getting to your computer in the first place.
- Use an email box inspection tool - Tools such as Mailwasher will allow you to view the contents of your email box directly on the server before downloading emails to your computer. This means you can delete spam emails before hitting "Send and Receive" in your email client.
- Be careful who you give your email address to - When registering for online forums and email newsletters condsider using a Hotmail email address or other such web based email address. You can also close this email account down if it starts getting inundated with spam.