Spam Management Tips

We all absolutely loathe spam. But unfortunately we can’t afford to ignore it. You can miss valuable business by being too strict on your spam rules. By its very nature, you are coaxed into opening spam by how important it looks. The spammers rely on this to use words like “contract” or “invoice” or similar that many businesses can’t afford to miss. So therefore it’s hard to “block” these words and phrases, and if you start trying to get clever by using overly strict software you can cost yourself money.

Let’s say a new client sends you an email for the first time. They aren’t on your “trusted senders” or “whitelisted” and they have put in the subject of their email “Contract acceptance” or similar. If you had a rule making anything with “contract” in the subject go to spam folder or be deleted you risk at best delaying the work. You will tie yourself in knots trying to avoid all spam. It’s an impossible dream.

Modern email servers do actually filter the vast majority of it (trust us, we have seen ones that don’t have it, and you don’t want to see how many there are let alone the shocking contents of most them).

In the long run, it’s a lot easier just to use a spam filter such as those that come with Outlook, or a cheaper one that has good reviews from other users, and do the hard yards and run through your junk folder manually to ensure you haven’t got a “false positive” in there. Even with the time it takes factored in, it’s a lot cheaper than missing critical information.