How to Stop Spam

Spam and viruses are a problem. Everyday, the CWS network is bombarded with hundreds of thousands of emails- of which only a small percentage are legitimate. As you can see from the chart below, we've blocked over 64 million spam emails from reaching our customer's inboxes and eliminated over 400,000 viruses.

If you don't have a quality web hosting company that filters your email (for free), how can YOU limit the amount of spam you receive? How did they get YOUR email address in the first place?

The first way a spammer might lock in your email address is by guessing. Many organizations have the email addresses where the first part of the email address is a general word such as "info", "sales", "accounts", "support", etc. People often use the email addresses beginning with their first name, for example, John, Sandra, Julia. Spammers simply put the first names before the @ symbol followed by a domain name, and get possible email addresses. If you want to combat this technique, make sure your email address is unique.

Secondly, spammers can gather email addresses from the Internet. They use programs that search web pages looking for email addresses. If your website lists a contact email address, that email address will eventually be obtained by spammers. To avoid this technique, we suggest you use a "contact form" where users submit their information to reach you. This will keep your email address private, but some people find long forms frustrating.

The third way spammers get your email address is to buy it on a list. If your email address has been collected & validated as "active" by a spammer they will eventually sell it to someone else. This escalates your problem as you'll continue to receive more and more spam.

So what can you do? Your best option would be to change your email address to something new and then "protect it" like your first born child.

If that's not possible, your first line of defense should be to use a web hosting company that has some sort of spam/virus protection. At CWS, we implemented the award winning Barracuda Spam Firewall appliance. This is a physical "computer" that processes every piece of mail that enters our network.

As an additional line of defense, we run the Cloudmark SpamNet software on some client machines. With these two anti-spam measures, we have been able to eliminate 100% of viruses and nearly 98% of all spam. This allows us to continue to use generic emails like sales@cws.net and post them prominently on our website.

Filed in: CWS, Rochester, spam, barracuda, virus