The battle against unwanted e-mails

Protect your e-mail address
The simplest rules first: Your business contacts are allowed to send you relevant information about used or offered services. But be careful how you “distribute” your e-mail address. Surveys and competitions are often used as a means to collect e-mail addresses. Spammers also like to get e-mail addresses from the Internet. These are addresses that are publicly visible on websites or in forums. It is better to avoid publicizing your address or to at least replace the @ sign with [at]. On your own website, it helps to use a contact form so that you don’t have to publish your e-mail address on the web.

Second e-mail address
If you have subscribed to numerous newsletters or are often active in forums, then it is a good idea to set up a second e-mail address. This makes it easy to radically clean out this e-mail inbox without deleting valuable correspondence. And speaking of newsletters – the unsubscribe link, which is mandatory in newsletters, works perfectly if the newsletter is from a reputable provider. Spammers use this link as a confirmation that the address is up-to-date. Then the flood of emails increases instead of decreases after you unsubscribe.

Healthy skepticism
Unfortunately, criminals use e-mails as virus spreaders. Links in e-mails as well as e-mail attachments are ways to sneak malware onto your computer. Phishing is very popular. You are requested to provide passwords, credit card data, and the like on behalf of organizations such as a bank, IT provider, etc. If a contact’s PC is infected, a deceptively real e-mail from a trusted person can be misused to spread malware. In this case, the only thing that helps is a healthy dose of skepticism and up-to-date virus protection.

Spam filters
Nearly all e-mail service providers use filters to protect their customers from the daily flood of spam e-mails. The sender’s address and links in the e-mails are compared with databases, and suspect e-mails are filtered out and deleted. As additional protection, customers with an e-mail solution hosted by Green at Hosted Exchange 2016 can manage their spam filters. For instance, they can create their own blacklists. This service also provides a daily overview of all e-mails that were filtered out. This makes it easy to move incorrectly filtered e-mails back to the inbox. The recipient has full control.