Technology Advisor Blog

In our last post, we talked about suspicious emails that don't look so suspicious on the surface.  Here is an example of an email to show you what to look for.  In this case, a fake payroll report is being sent.   A busy, distracted person may open this by mistake, or an opportunistic employee may try to open it to sneak a peek at confidential information.  SLOW DOWN and check your mail carefully.  Even with up to date antivirus protection and spam filtering, some emails CAN get through because they are engineered to get through.  This can be a phishing email (trying to get confidential information) or a dangerous virus such as Cryptocker.   Don't open the door!  

Microsoft Outlook has a built in feature to process junk mail and send it to a "Junk" folder as a way to control Spam in your inbox.  This is a great feature if you only read mail in one place, but for most users these days, mail is read on multiple platforms - smart phone, tablet, laptop, browser, etc.  This is why we typically recommend filtering Spam in the "cloud" so the mail is filtered BEFORE it gets to your mailbox, and gets cleaned centrally before going to all your devices.

One of the services we provide to our clients is spam filtering.  The goal is to stop the spam BEFORE it gets to the mail server so it doesn't wind up on the users' desktop, laptop, iPad, smart phone, etc....  Each month when we do the reporting and roll up the numbers, it's amazing how much volume there is. Overall, around 80% of all email traffic is flagged as spam.  For some of our clients, this means blocking out tens of thousands of messages a month.  I looked at our own domain yesterday, and in February, over 10,000 messages were blocked or quarantined, including 348 emails containing viruses.  

Whenever there's a mystery regarding a "missing" email, the first thing we look at is if the email is sitting in a spam filter.  We always recommend just using one spam filter, preferably "in the cloud" so mail is filtered BEFORE it gets to your mail server, and distributed to your laptop, smartphone, iPad, and wherever else you read your mail.

Here's a question we hear a lot:  "Why doesn't my spam filter block ALL my spam?"  We typically implement Postini spam filtering for our clients (sometimes Barracuda), and when we examine the monthly reports, overall, about 80% of incoming mail is either blocked or quarantined as spam.  This is a HUGE amount of mail, and consistent with industry reports which typically track even higher in the 90% range.  The filters, though not perfect, keep a LOT of clutter out of your inbox and off your smart phone.

This sounds like a funny question because who would ever send themself a spam email?  What you really received is a "spoofed" message.  It's actually easy to alter an email to change the "from" address to make it appear that it's coming from someone else.  Basically a forgery.  (This is one of the reasons that if you use a spam filter, you shouldn't necessarily safe list your own address.)

A customer contacted us a few days ago with an email dilemma.  They had been receiving a valued daily report through email, and all of a sudden they stopped receiving it and found that it was in their spam filter and wondered why.

Have you ever had an important email go missing?  An important customer order that just doesn't arrive in your inbox? Well, the the first place to look is your spam filter.  There's a good chance that the email may have gotten flagged as a "false positive" for spam.  If you check your spam filter, you'll find the message.  As long as you only need to look in one place, it's a quick detour.