The Most Effective Ways to Avoid Spam

There are a number of common anti-spam methods that even a non-IT person can perform to restrict mailings. If you do not want to spend your time manually filtering all unwanted entries in your mailbox, then we have some effective approaches for you. Check them out and pick an option that works best for you.

Among the most effective ways to combat spam are IP spam check from Cleantalk, blacklists, email categorization, and many more. What are the solutions?

Unsubscribe from a mailing list that you have definitely not subscribed to. This works if the unsubscribe link is configured correctly and leads exactly to where the user’s address is excluded from the spam listing. If the link leads to an empty page or is misconfigured, you will not be able to unsubscribe.
Using an additional mailbox for registration. Thus, the main mailing address is less likely to end up on spam lists. Anything superfluous comes to an additional address and not on your main one.
Configuring the sorting of incoming letters into specialized folders. When there are too many junk emails in your inbox, create special folders for important categories of emails to prevent spam from reaching them. So, it will be clear that the inbox contains mostly spam, and the desired messages will not be lost from view.

In the IT industry, spam trends are constantly changing. New options for bypassing existing filtration methods appear; new antidotes are being developed for new methods. Below is a brief overview of the most effective and time-tested technologies for fighting spam mailings.

Blacklists

Blacklist or DNS-based Blackhole List can be configured individually for each mailbox or for a mail address group. The lists consist of domains and IP addresses from which spam is sent. Blacklists can be private and public. Private blacklists are created by users themselves when they restrict the receipt of email from a specific sender. For large aggregators of spam mailings, private blacklists are not dangerous, unlike public ones.

Content Filtering

The essence of this method is based on analyzing the content of the mailing list. If emails contain fragments of content typical of the spam (certain words, snippets of text, images), then the sender’s address is sent to the blacklist along with related domains. The advantage of content filtering is the ability to customize it for specific user requests. The efficiency of the method is very high; however, significant labor costs are required.

Fighting Spam with Technical Tools

Internet service providers, email clients, and many other intermediaries between content consumers and senders use a variety of techniques to eliminate spam. For corporations, businesses, and government agencies, the default protection provided by the provider is not enough to ensure the proper level of security and convenience. Therefore, the main task of the system administrator is to get the optimal filtering out of all that is unnecessary without losing the necessary data. For this, specialists use specialized software and apply their own developments. Protection methods have to be constantly updated to keep pace with the ingenuity of spammers.

The effectiveness of protection depends not only on what methods for fighting spam are used but also on fine-tuning of the filtering. There are no universal solutions to this issue. The number of Internet users is constantly growing, and the issue of spam mailings will be relevant in the coming years. Legal methods of killing spam senders do not work with 100% accuracy yet. Therefore, technical means remain the most reliable and effective in organizing spam blocking.

In such a way, you can protect your corporate mail from spam, viruses, and phishing. When using special data protecting tools, your potential contact with unwanted messages will be minimal, thanks to the fact that the filtering occurs before the redirection of email to your mail network. What is more, the popular majority of programs can be integrated into any mail service and domain. They guarantee protection based on spam databases and algorithmic developments and automatically remove the spam data from the internal system.

Alternative Methods of Protection

Every advertising message has particular words and phrases that form its part. These can be words such as buy, best offer, promo, and so on. After analyzing the email message, you can accurately determine whether it is advertising or not. Plagiarism recognition systems work similarly to this method when they search for parts of the message that are taken from other sources. Apart from scanning email texts, such solutions also analyze the header as well as the subject of the email. Based on a data report, the system makes a concussion, whether it is spam or not.

Technical Tools & Employee Awareness

In general, the issue of spam can be solved in two different ways: on the side of the mail server and on the side of a recipient. In the first case, the task is not to let the spam message land in the user’s mailbox. In the second scenario, it is necessary to correctly recognize the threat in an already received letter and issue a warning to the user that the message is dangerous.

What Works Best?

There are dozens of different solutions on the market explicitly designed to protect people against spam mailings. In this post, we have listed some of them and briefly described their key features. When choosing specific tools to combat spam, start from the real needs of your organization and remember that one of the important elements of protection is your employees’ awareness of how to distinguish a spam message and what to do when it is already in the mailbox. The simple rule guiding people not to click on suspicious links can save you from a lot of problems. It is extremely important to maintain a dialogue with colleagues, teach them the basics of information security, and have iron-clad data protection technology in place. Only, in its case, can you be sure that no sensitive information can be hacked and used against you.