BlueTie Blog

15 Steps to Spam Free Email

Spam email. Who of us has not opened our inbox to find unwanted (and sometimes offensive) emails from sources we’ve never heard of? They are distracting and annoying. Did you know that recent studies have shown that 90 percent of all emails are considered spam? It’s true. And not only are spam emails annoying, but they can be a huge drain on productivity. Spam emails are estimated to cost between $10 billion and $90 billion per year in direct costs and productivity loss! And it is said that 90 percent of all computer viruses originate through email attachments. So not only do they drain productivity, but they have the potential to cause damage to your files and your computer.

There are steps you can take to put a stop to spam emails. In many cases, stopping most spam is as easy as properly setting up your spam filters. But spammers are becoming very sophisticated at figuring out how to trick these filters and get emails past them. We wanted to make you aware of a number of other steps you can use to defend yourself against spam.

1. Keep your email address hidden
One of the most common ways that spammers collect email addresses is through special bots that scour the web for email addresses. They can pickup your email address from contact pages, message boards, social networks and anywhere else they might be found. To control this, you need to be very careful about where you post your email address and how. To avoid being picked up by one of these bots, you should consider posting your email address as an image or writing the whole thing out like this: email at gmail dot com. If you list your email address on your own website or blog, consider setting up a contact form instead of listing your email address.

2. Think twice before providing your email address
Before you signup for that newsletter you just stumbled across, take a moment to do some research to make sure the company is legitimate. A lot of these newsletters are setup for the purpose of adding more emails to spam lists. There are also a number of people that will sell their email lists to spammers. Next time you are tempted to signup for that new beta account or newsletter, take a minute to make sure you’re not handing your email address over to a spammer.

3. Register a throwaway email address
Sometimes it is very hard to determine if someone is a spammer before handing over your email address. So what I like to do is register an email address that is used only for newsletters and beta signups. Keep this separate from your personal email address, that way the spam doesn’t become as much of an annoyance.

If your mail service allows you to create ‘Alias’ email addresses this is a perfect way to set up a secondary address. If your address is address at email dot com then create an Alias of junkaddress at email dot com and set a filter to send all email from that address to your junk folder.

4. Don’t reply to spam
One way that spammers verify active email accounts is from those that reply to their emails. If they tell you to reply to be removed from the list don’t fall for it, chances are they will just send you more spam in the future.

5. Don’t open spam
Try to avoid opening spam emails. Sometimes you can’t avoid it but when possible you definitely should. Spam email will often include a snippet of code that once opened will ping their server to tell them it’s an active email address. Try to delete as much spam as possible without opening it.

6. Register a fresh email address (or create a new Alias)
The longer you have your email address the more likely it is that spam has been accumulating in it. At this point it’s a good idea to just register a fresh email address because the problem will just keep getting worse, not better. This isn’t always easy with personal email accounts so consider using both email addresses while all your old contacts migrate over. Don’t forget to backup any important emails and update any other websites where you have an account.

7. Don’t participate in chain emails
Taking part in email chains is a great way to forward jokes and other interesting information to all your contacts. But recipients of the email are listed in the body of the email for as long as the email remains active. If a spammer gets a hold of this email every one of those addresses will be added to their spam list. It’s not hard for spammers to end up with these emails either. All it takes is one person to forward to all their contacts and accidentally include a spammer.

8. Don’t open phishing emails
Although it is a nice thought, you haven’t won the lottery, Microsoft isn’t going to pay you $1000 dollars for every person you email, and that nice guy in Africa really isn’t going to give you $50 million. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Don’t open these emails and don’t respond to them if you do.

9. Properly use spam filters
As mentioned earlier, one of the best ways to eliminate spam is to properly use your spam filter. Most email accounts will let you simply mark spam email as such. Make sure you use this feature. By doing so, it will make sure that any spam emails gets added to your blacklist. The problem with this is that sometimes spammers will just use a unique email address for every blast. One defense against this is to look at the domain the email is being sent from. If it is a spam domain or one that you don’t recognize you can just block the whole domain.

In addition to blocking email addresses and domains you can also set most spam filters to block emails based on keywords appearing in the title or body of the email. Watch for keywords that are common with spam but aren’t likely to be used by a friend. When you spot those add them to your spam filter.

10. Frequently scan your spam folder
Spam filters are not perfect and many times perfectly legitimate emails will often end up there. Make it a habit to regularly scan your spam folder and make sure any real emails that you find in there are marked as “not spam”.

11. Uncheck offer boxes
When you signup for any account online or make purchases there are usually little boxes that ask if you want to receive additional offers. Usually these are checked by default. Make sure when you signup for new accounts that these boxes are not checked otherwise you may start receiving offers from their partners.

12. Eliminate catchall accounts
If you own your own domain name, you probably have email included in part of your hosting service. Many hosting accounts offer catchall accounts which means any email address at your domain dot com will be forwarded to you. Spammers will often crawl the web and add domain name they come across. Instead of looking for specific emails they will automatically address them to something like; info at your domain dot com. If you have catchall setup, it doesn’t matter what exact email address they use, you’ll get spam.

13. Ignore return to sender emails
Another trick that spammers will use to get you to open their emails is to send fake delivery failure emails. If you see one of these it’s best just to ignore it, otherwise you’re asking for more spam or even worse, a worm.

14. Avoid emails not addressed to you
There’s a great chance that if you receive an email that is not addressed to you then it is spam. It’s best to avoid opening these altogether and instead just adding them to your spam filter.

15. Report spam
In North America there is a CAN-SPAM act that is designed to help with spam violations. Although reporting spam usually doesn’t do much to stop the spammers it does help. Here are some places that you can report spam to: ISPs, email hosts, domain registrars, blacklists, SpamCop, FTC or the National Fraud Information Center.

Here at BlueTie, we use industry-leading anti-spam and anti-phishing techniques to protect every account. Users are also allowed to generate their own “safe” and “block” lists. Even so, this doesn’t always prevent spammers from emailing you, so it’s best to take the necessary steps to avoid it altogether.  If you're a BlueTie user, you can find out more about BlueTie’s Junk Mail Controls in Help . BlueTie also offers a Catch-All Email Address feature and unlimited aliases. Finally, BlueTie has several Rules & Restrictions governing email that thwart spammers and can save you time and help protect you from spam by decreasing the amount of spam coming into the system.

15,000 Small Businesses "Heart" BlueTie

On this internationally recognized day of love and affection, I’d like to point out how much small businesses are in love with the fact that they now have access to a true business-class email and calendaring application without the high costs usually associated with such services.  Since it launched in October 2006, more than 15,000 small businesses have expressed their “true feelings” by registering for BlueTie Free.

That love is only going to grow stronger when next month BlueTie Free users will experience the first round of Featuretisements, giving users access to business services that simplify everyday tasks, such as air and hotel reservations from Orbitz and email marketing from Constant Contact.  Don’t be afraid, express yourself and tell me your BlueTie love story.

Free Information From BlueTie

We've heard from many of our customers that they selected BlueTie because their small business is growing and they need email, calendaring, contact and files tools that can grow with them. Traditionally, small and mid-sized businesses have had little choice when considering advanced messaging systems. Microsoft Exchange was the only option for businesses seeking collaboration tools like shared calendars and contacts combined with true business class email, despite the complexity and high cost of implementing and maintaining Exchange. BlueTie changes this model by offering 'better than Exchange' functionality at a fraction of the cost.

Today BlueTie launched two new ways for finding out more about BlueTie and how it can help your growing business. The first is a Free Custom Evaluation. Simply complete a short online form and a BlueTie representative will call you to understand your business needs and interests in BlueTie. Following your conversation, a custom assessment of how BlueTie can help your growing business will be sent to you via email.

The second is a Free Webinar on Wednesdays at 11am or 2pm (ET). Once you sign up for a free Webinar an email with a link to the Webinar and information for the audio portion of the Webinar will be sent to you. Simply join the Webinar at your chosen time, 11am or 2pm ET and see how BlueTie can help your growing business.

We hope that you will take advantage of these new ways to find out more about BlueTie.

I'll 'see' you at the the Webinar on Wednesday!

Creating Links in Email: Don't load your email messages up with attachments and images

When you use email to send a customer newsletter, follow-up after a sales call or respond to a request for information, it's important to be considerate of the recipient when composing the message. I frequently receive emails with multiple attachments and I seldom open them. Although BlueTie supports an industry leading attachment size of 25MB, many recipient's email systems can't handle really big attachments. Also, opening an attachment adds another step to the process a customer or prospect has to go through to get your message, decreasing the likelihood they will actually see it.

Fortunately there's a simple fix. Put your messages on your web site as web pages or PDF documents and link to them in your email. This keeps the email simple and gives your recipients a one click way to access the info. There are two ways you can embed web links into your email:

• Simply copy and paste the URL from the target page into the email
• Even better (and more professional), use our Link tool. Choose the word or phrase in your email message that you want to link to the web page, highlight it and click the Link tool- it looks like a little chain. Paste the web page URL into the dialog box that appears. You can also add a Tooltip. This is a description of the link that appears when the user mouses over the link. So you might link to a sales doc and your tooltip might say: AntiSpam Information. Click OK in the dialog box and you're done.

Anyone who has received an email with tons of pictures and attachments will really appreciate this approach. Instead of loading the email itself with large images and attachments, link to them on the web. You'll save your customers time, your message is less likely to get blocked as spam (multiple attachments are a red flag) and you'll drive traffic to your web site.

Your John Hancock

Do you use a signature on your emails in a consistent manner? Are you taking full advantage of this opportunity from a marketing point of view?

If you're not, go to your Preferences, choose Name and Signature and set one up. A signature shouldn't be an ad; it should be a concise set of information so your customers, partners and vendors can easily respond the way they choose: your direct phone, IM, website, etc. They all should be there so the recipient doesn't have to track down your info elsewhere.

If you have a very concise marketing message, i.e. Get Your Free BlueTie Now!, you can include it (from the 'Another Shameless Plug Department'!).

I have friends who include their quote of the day, a link to a cool site, etc. Just remember, in most email clients these longer signatures end up 'below the fold', i.e. out of view in a standard email viewing pane- so they probably won't get seen. Keep it brief and the territory can be valuable.

Receiving your Gmail™ in your BlueTie account

Do you have Gmail you'd like to have forwarded into your BlueTie account? It's easy- simply go into your Gmail account and click 'Settings' in the upper right hand corner. Then Click 'Forwarding and POP' in the top menu of the setting box. Check 'Forward a Copy To...' and enter your BlueTie email address.

That's it- now you can read and reply to your Gmail from within BlueTie- no more multiple logins.

(Gmail is a registered trademark of Google Inc.)

Automated Scheduling of Meetings

Imagine you're scheduling a meeting that involves a half dozen people, possibly including customers or vendors that are not using BlueTie. Without BlueTie you'd probably email a series of timeslots to your invitees and make several calls to find a mutually available time. With BlueTie this process can be streamlined to the point where it only takes a few clicks to get the same result. This is where Shared Calendars demonstrates the power of our collaboration software.
To use this feature, click your Calendar icon and click the New Event button. A window opens the New Event form. Click the Contacts icon and you'll see all your BlueTie contacts including people outside of your business. Click the names of attendees and they will appear in the attendee list. Name the event, select a time and add any necessary descriptive notes. When you click Save a few interesting things happen. BlueTie checks the calendars of co-workers and tells you if they have a conflict. If they do, you can select another time. Once you've Saved an Event, BlueTie sends a meeting notification to other BlueTie users which they can Accept or Decline. It also sends a similar notification, via email, to non-BlueTie users. They can Accept or Decline by clicking their choice in the email. You can see who has responded by double-clicking on the Event in your Calendar.
When everyone in the meeting is using BlueTie you don't have to keep trying different times until you find one when everyone is available. Simply fill out your Event form and select First Available. The system searches everyone's Calendars and brings back the next time you're all free. If that time isn't good, simply click it again and it goes on to the next timeslot available. You can continue until you find the best time.
The real value of having an integrated application like BlueTie is this kind of functionality. It can literally save hours of time monthly for people with busy schedules. Considering that you can use it for free, that's not a bad deal!

in it Spam: Tips for optimizing your anti-spam protection in BlueTie

Over the weekend a group of Russian spammers created a virtual network of hijacked computers and sent millions, if not billions, of spam messages touting penny stocks. You may have seen some of these messages- they typically have a name followed by 'in it' in the subject line. BlueTie's spam filters caught most of them but a few got through, in part because of the sheer volume: it's been estimated that they hit 70% of the mailboxes in the US alone and many millions more worldwide.

According to the Register, the plan did not work. This spam is fairly unique because it is easy to track its exact effect on the stocks they were pushing and, apparently, the stocks did not make significant moves after the spam blasts. Most spam success is not trackable like this. The good news is that they'll probably stop this particular pattern.

Using BlueTie's Anti-Spam Controls

Anti-spam is a major feature of BlueTie and one we are constantly monitoring and improving. In spite of what the boxed AS software may claim, there is not one simple fix for the problem as spammers are constantly adjusting their systems to bypass filters. Because they adjust, we adjust and our systems have the ability to adapt to new patterns of abuse. We filter domains that are known spammers at the perimeter of our system so you never see spam from them.

In your Preferences page (there's a link to it at the top right corner of BlueTie) you can set your level of protection. If you see an increase in spam getting into your Inbox, try raising it by a point. The most important activity you can do to cut down on spam is to Mark any spams that do get through as Junk. This is done by highlighting the email, then clinking on the Mark As button and selecting Junk. This moves the email into your Junk folder and blocks any more email from that address from getting into your Inbox.

Managing Your Junk Folder

You'll want to check your Junk folder before emptying it to make sure there are no 'false positives' in there, i.e. emails you wanted to get. Use the Mark As button to mark these Not Junk and it will work in reverse, placing them into your inbox and clearing that sender's address from the spam system.

To Empty your Junk folder, right click on the folder name and select Empty. This will permanently delete the contents so make sure you've taken a look at the mail in there first.

Finally, never open or download an attachment or mail message from someone you don't know- delete it without opening if possible. BlueTie's anti-virus strips known viruses off of email before they get to you but no system is 100% safe. A few precautions and regular maintenance of your Anti-spam system by following the steps above will keep your email safe and secure.

Update:

There's a new batch of spams from the same group. They now are a name followed by 'wrote:'. Same deal so something must have worked. Fortunately they're all ending up in my Junk mail folder.

Invite Your Friends and Colleagues to Open Free BlueTie Accounts

If you've opened a free BlueTie account you may have noticed that you have a number of Invitations available to you on the My Day page (the first page that opens after logging in). They're in the right hand column below the Universal Inbox. These are provided as an easy way to invite other business owners and anyone else who you think would like to check out BlueTie. They're very easy to use: just click on the Invitation, click a recipient from your Contacts to send it to and you're done. You can use our text or add your own. Your invitee can accept or decline the invitation as they choose. If they choose not to try BlueTie, they will not receive further contact from us as a result of your invite- we respect your privacy.

Help us spread the word about BlueTie Free- we think it's a great solution for any small business.

Welcome International BlueTie Users

As promised last week, our BlueTie Free online business email, calendaring and collaboration offering is now available worldwide. We've made the sign-up form global. Please note that BlueTie currently only offers an English language version, however we are planning the eventual roll-out of additional languages in 2007.

Update: Please ignore the sentence regarding US only access at the top of the form- it is incorrect and will be removed shortly. Thanks!