Out Damn Spam

Well, I'll be the first to admit it, it's been a little while since my last post. You know, I've read that over 50 million blogs have been abandoned and are now longer being updated, which basically makes them orphans. Well I'm not going to let that happen to this blog.

Basically, the reason for my reticence is spam's recent great resurgence. My company, Message Partner's, has been battling this recent flood, surge, outright global spamming epidemic that's going on right now. Did you know that spam now accounts for just about 9 out of every 10 email messages sent today. That just makes that 1 out of 10 real emails all that much more important.

I mean, aren't people starting to get a clue? If spam worked like it said it did, people would now need pills to make their sex organs smaller. Actually, the truth is, spam has changed, and they've switched from the pharmaceutical come-on, shifting to stock pump-and-dump scams as well as phishing. Phising, as I'm sure you probably know, are emails that pretend to be from actual banks or legitimate internet merchant sites that typically warn you that something unauthorized has happened to your account, and please click on this link and sign in and get everything back in order. Only problem, it's a SCAM, the link generally goes to a fake site using borrowed graphics (graphics are just so easy to steal on the internet), which means the information you've just typed in to clear everything up has now turned everything bad. Very very bad.

Phishing is a scourge, one that threatens the very viability of email, so please, never ever ever respond to an email message from a bank or eBay or Amazon no matter how official it looks. If you think you are having account trouble, go straight to the site by typing it directly into the address bar.

Well, it's near the end of the day Friday, and I got some other stuff to do. So the reason for the delay is this sudden onslaught of damned spam. But, while I admit this groundswell of junk email did catch us folks at Message Partners somewhat by surprise, we've battled back quite well, thank you, and have plenty of nifty tools in our email platform that will not only defeat spam, it'll stop it from ever even getting on your server. We've also got some excellent tools to fight phishing.

Yes indeedy. Have a great weekend, all. I'll be back with another post before you can eat a full can of actual Spam.

Tags: Spam, Stop Spam, Fight Phishing