Do You Think Spam Blacklist a Good Investment?

For most companies online and businesses, this is one of the most common questions they have ever asked. That is whether to invest on a reputable spam blacklist filter or not. Others have said it is a good investment because they think that it could lessen or minimize future problems with their business at the same time they can maintain a clean spam free email accounts on their network. While on the other hand some have thought that it is just a waste of money and it could not help grow their business at all.

Here are some of the reasons why they have suggested using email blacklist to keep their image as well as their reputation being a company. First thing is that no one wants to be flooded by email spam, imagine deleting thousands of these on your inbox. I am sure you would not want that to happen. Second to consider is the direct cost of spam. Let us say you have been email-bomb, the processing and storage space taken up by spam also incurs a burden on computational resources of the organization that includes financial. Another reason is when an employee starts to receive more than 50 emails per day will sure having difficulties handling all those emails at once. Errors may arise from being overwhelmed. Fourth issue is on security implications. Most clients and customers have been sharing their credit card on the internet especially on the company they have been trusting. What if they have been tricked, like an email coming from a phishing site then they will enter their personal info and the end they will find out that they are already been hacked by somebody. Now you are finally aware of what possible consequences you can get if you will not use a spam blacklist filter.

Everyone Needs an Email Spam Blacklist

Spam Blockers, Spam Blacklist, Spam filters, or Email Blacklist whatever you call them they have the same purpose that is to combat spam emails. These kinds of security measures were really important especially if you run an email marketing campaign in your business. To tell you honestly not just business owners are in need of spam filters even for personal use especially if you want a clean spam-free inbox of yours and always expecting an important email from relatives on the states.

To avoid receiving spam do not give away your emails especially to those who you don’t know, avoid leaving your email in websites that you have visited because most spam comes from their email newsletters. Also stay away from online advertisements that ask your email for an exchange of whatever they are offering. Don’t publish your e-mail on internet until absolutely necessary. Turn on your firewalls for extra added protection against your network it can help black spam emails immediately. Actually there are three types of anti-spam software including plug-ins for email clients. It will run on your computer and will require all received spam to be downloaded before sorting them out. There is also what we called stand alone applications in which communicate with the email server several times to check the POP mailbox for spam and will delete them automatically. Lastly there are also server-side email spam blacklist, this kind of filters scans emails for certain trigger like spam keywords, phrases, formatting, and other spam methods though some spammers have discovered how to fool this security measures.

Image-Based Spam can Bypass Spam Blacklist Filter

Bad news for email users like us because spammers have discovered a new way how to bypass even the most advanced spam blacklist filters using an image content. Maybe you are wondering how did this image content works, instead of spamming the emails with text based content what the spammers did is they create an image with text messages as pictures, it can also be a screenshot, and combination of these two. By doing this spam filters was fooled by the images thus it does not mark the email as spam. That is a very neat idea of bypassing email blacklist filters.

The problem with our email spam blacklist filters is that they are taught to detect spam based on the content which is text and they are not capable to read the pictures of words in images, that vulnerability was discovered by the genius people. In addition to the usual annoyance, image-based spam eats a lot of resources from your server including bandwidth than receiving a regular text mail because each image attached is most probably larger than regular spam mail – that affects the business finances. One threat that image-based spam can also bring is that there is a possibility that the spammer has inserted a unique tracker which work when a recipient opens the message and let the sender know it’s a valid email address, then you will be receiving more emails in the future.

Email Blacklist Extension For Magento

While looking for a new email spam blacklist tools, I’ve found Magento Commerce website that contain Magento extension. Honestly speaking it’s my first time to see this product, though it really caught my attention when i first saw this maybe because of the features of their email blacklist product that they’re offering. It is also stated that by default you can’t block domains by just using Magento alone, that’s the reason why email blacklist extension was created. It will help you fight spam and at the same time will help you save more time doing the old routines.

The extension is said to filter any email that uses wild card masks like a*@*, it can also handle customer registration security, and has the ability to spam check guest checkout to secure transaction, other features of this service is that it is 100% made open source and very easy to install even you don’t have a background with spam filters. If you’ll buy this product additional services includes a 2 week-money back guarantee, 6-month free e-mail support for professional version with guide and assistance, and has the option for clients to customize this extension. If you’ve already use this product/service you can share your experience with them here in my Spam Blacklist blog.

How to Fight E-mail Spam

I know each and every one of us wants to have clean email inbox folders for us to have an organized mailing list and email accounts. But the problem there are lot of spam emails being sent to our inbox that contains different advertisements which we’re not familiar with and that was really annoying. Here are some of the effective ways on how to fight this spam problem.

• Check your firewall – This security feature in windows is your 1st defense against spam. It will protect your network for different attacks that may enters

• Check for Viruses – Be sure to scan at least three times a month to check for viruses, especially if you are using outlook and change your password.

• Use Email Filters – What can email filters do is it will automatically quarantine viruses from emails, and spam before reaching the servers on your network.

• Spam Blacklist Filter – This prevention technique is actually a database of collective spam in the net and you can set it to your server and it will automatically check all incoming emails and it will match if there are related spams in the database.

• Check relay setting – This will help trigger which server has the right time to send SMTP emails on behalf of the organization. You can easily limit the IP address to email users or else spammers will take advantage with your mail server and send unsolicited e-mails.

• Blocking port 25 – This method will allow your outbound traffic on TCP port 25 as it is used for email traffic. Blocking this port will prevent mass mails and spam zombies.

• Applying Reverse DNS – By using reverse DNS it will have an IP address with a domain name and they spam check and match the email address domain name with the IP address and if it doesn’t match, it will be considered as spam.

Spam Blacklist Services Saves the Day!

Whether you’re an email marketing consultant, or a regular internet user who always use email, I’m sure spam is the biggest problem you’re facing on your day to day email experience. That’s why different companies created spam blacklist services that will ensure your email is free of spam junkies for us to have a headache-free email experience. If it’s you’re first time to hear the word spam filter or spam blocker, this services or tools will automatically filter those emails like penis enlargement, Viagra, easy way to get rich stuffs, and etc. These services uses a database of spam keywords which are hand pick by humans, then when you received a mail the spam blacklist services will automatically checks the emails body, email address, subject title and match on their database. If the email has detected to be a spam then it will automatically sends to your spam folder or to your paid email blacklist service.

But before hand you can avoid these spam emails by simply avoiding subscribing to any site that seems more of an advertisement, stay away from “Join now it’ Free” scams, and lastly don’t give to anybody your email or simply don’t respond to unsolicited emails that you’re receiving because once you’ve replied to that email it will starts sending spam emails everyday and we really don’t want that to happen. So always remember these things and I’m sure you will not get any problems dealing with SPAM emails anymore. If you have some tips and guides you want to share just leave them here as a comment.