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How To Get Rid Of Spam

Holy cow! It’s a whole new year…

Okay, I’ve been away for the blog far too long. The truth is that I’ve been distracted with so many little projects, preparations for the holidays, and laying plans for the future that I have simply neglected to update my blog here.

In the last few weeks, I have been making last-minute purchases for my online business. I always like to pre-pay my various vendor accounts, stock up on supplies, and purchase any business equipment or software, so that that I can take the tax reduction in the current year.

This year, I have spent a good deal of time considering security issues. You may not realize this, but once you make the decision to become an Internet marketer you expose yourself to a number of nuisances and potential criminal activity on the Internet.

The nuisances include things such as spam, viruses, hacking attempts, phishing, etc. The criminal activity that most concerns me is identity theft and the fraudulent use of my personal information.

These pitfalls are not a reason to avoid the Internet, however. You simply need to be informed and take appropriate precautions to protect yourself.

In this post a lot focus upon spam, what it is, what it risks it presents, and how to protect yourself. In common parlance, “spam” has come to be known as anything that lands in our e-mail that is of an unwanted nature. We don’t care where it came from, whether we had requested the information or once upon a time signed up for the mailing list. It is now annoying and we don’t want it any more.

As far as the law is concerned, “spam” refers to unsolicited commercial e-mail messages. As such, e-mail received from a mailing list to which you subscribed is not considered “spam” under the law because you solicited the information or otherwise invited the sender to contact you.

The federal anti-spam legislation is called the “Controlling the Assault of Non-solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003,” better known as CANSPAM. The actual language of the statute can be easily found on the Internet from a Google search. As an Internet marketer, you should be familiar with the basic rules that apply when using e-mail to market products or services. That is the subject of a different blog post, however.

Right now, I want to make sure that you are aware of the dangers posed by the flow of e-mail you are likely to receive once you begin operating a business on the Internet. My personal experience has been adapting the vast majority of e-mails received on any given day are unsolicited and send by persons who take great pains to cloak their identity and remain anonymous to avoid the repercussions associated with spamming.

Once your e-mail address becomes available on the Internet, it will likely be added to multiple mail lists used by illegitimate marketers. These are the guys that are trying to sell you Viagra, OxyContin, pornography, all sorts of miscellaneous products and services, or enticing you to help some poor widow of the former finance minister of Mozambique who was murdered as part of a political coup. Yeah, we all get those same messages…

About two years ago this became a real problem for me, as I was literally receiving thousands of unsolicited e-mails on a daily basis. It had literally become impossible for me to identify legitimate e-mails among the flood of unsolicited messages. Bear in mind, that this was despite my use of Spam Assassin on my mail server and other e-mail filtering tools.

Ultimately, I did find a solution that I continue to use today. It is a simple “challenge and response” method, whereby those who attempt to send an e-mail to you will receive an automated e-mail in response to their message. They are simply asked to click on a link contained in the challenge e-mail, which verifies their legitimacy as a sender.Those folks who operate spam farms are typically cloaking their identities, including their “reply to” addresses, and will likely never receive the challenge e-mail.

The system remembers those who successfully verify their identity, so that verification need only take place once for each unique e-mail address. Alternatively, you can add senders to the “verified” list manually, sparing them the task.

You may also authorize an entire domain, so that e-mails received from any address at that domain will automatically be allowed into your inbox. This is quite useful when dealing with large organizations such as your bank.

Any e-mail that is not verified is held for a number of days and is ultimately deleted, automatically. Once up and running, the system is largely transparent to you and you will spend very little time maintaining it.

I found that within about one week the majority of legitimate senders from whom I wish to receive the e-mail were properly validated either by their own action or by me manually adding them. I quickly added several domains and e-mail addresses manually, simply by running down the list of messages I had received over the prior month.

If a particularly tenacious spammer does manage to verify one or more addresses from which he is sending, it is also possible for you to blacklist that particular sender. This is an easy process, and one that I find I do not need to use but perhaps one or two times each year.

Some additional benefits are that all e-mails and attachments are scanned by the service for possible viruses. The e-mails are stored on the service’s mail servers until verified and downloaded by you. This reduces the risk of your server or computer becoming damaged from malicious code. If a virus is detected, it is immediately quarantined.

The service also allows you to add your own branding, which prevents your subscribers in business associates from overlooking your verification e-mails as having come from some third party that they do not recognize. Verification screens of on the web can carry your logo, which adds a level of professionalism and comfort since they recognize your business during the verification process.

The service is offered by a company called Spam Arrest. It is a service I find to be quite affordable, and typically I will pre-pay for one to two years. In exchange for the nominal fee, I can protect several e-mail accounts and totally eliminate the crippling deluge of unsolicited e-mails.

For more information about the service, you can click through to their information page here.

How Spam Arrest Works

Also, if this is a service that your subscriber base may find valuable an affiliate program is available. You can get more information about that program, and sign up, here:

Spam Arrest Affiliate Program

In future posts, I’ll talk about some of the security issues that you should be aware of if you are going to market on the Internet. I will also share what I have done to protect myself come as wells my family.

To your success.

Chris

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