Internet Defense Technologies

There are so many problems with service based internet issues today it’s a wonder anyone still emails! From Spam, to Malware, to Viruses, Phishing attempts and on and on it is a barrage of funk.

Imagine walking down the street and people yelling at you to buy this or try that or whatever other random comments real life Spam would consist of. Or if you went into a department store to buy something and no one was there to charge you for your purchases. I’d walk out and never go back!

As was recently announced Google’s Postini was shut down preventing many people from getting emails for hours and some for days.

Service support, per Tweets was nil. Which only adds to the irritation because if there is anything worse than having problems with internet and mail it is having problems with trying to resolve those problems!

There are REAL solutions to Spam and the host of other internet related filth out there!

Total Mail Defense (TMD) – not to be confused with Total Male Enhancement – is one of those providers!

I have had great success, uninterrupted, by using this service. There is no “Spam folder” to have to deal with, it is set up for real people who have real lives that don’t need extra work created by a “solution”.

Every year or two, Ferris Research updates its estimates for the total cost of spam, earlier this year they did the 2009 estimates .

Their estimates: "Worldwide, spam will cost us all $130 billion; in the U.S. alone, $42 billion. That’s a 30% increase over our 2007 estimates, which themselves were a 100% increase over our 2005 figures."

They further explain the breakdown of where this is costing money:

• User productivity cost (deleting spam, looking for false positives, etc.): 85%
• Help desk cost (IT helping end users deal with spam): 10%
• Spam control software/hardware/service (licensing fees, amortized capital costs, etc.): 5%

Well with Total Mail Defense making it so you have don’t have to delete spam or look for false positives that reduces that amount by 85%.

I am feeling pretty good about our assistance in helping the economy by reducing the money wasted.

Just one of our systems blocked 13.1 million messages in one week.

That equaled 99% of all traffic sent through it!  Meaning that our customers servers never had to bear that load and this barrage never slowed down their systems.

With 1% of email making it past our first level of filtering, another 27% were blocked at the next stage.

Through all of this, not one legitimate email was blocked.

This is WAY more than usual amounts of traffic, email spam is definitely not slowing down.

Firstly you do not need to install yet another piece of Software on your computers, and if you have a company of any size this can for sure be cumbersome, even if it is a server side push install to the whole base.

Spam and AV Software is known to slow windows systems down drastically, which is another good reason to migrate these things to a service where you can.  The less software you have on a windows system that needs to use the windows registry the better off that system will be.  Also, another great reason to move to a service is you can increase bandwidth on your LAN (Local Area Network).  The reason for this is obvious, resources are not being hung up by too much Spam.

The SAAS Market is new and exciting, from my viewpoint its the best thing to happen to the whole industry.  Take away system resource hogs and put them somewhere else, and managed by others that are professionals in their own area.

This saves TIME AND MONEY for any company, and in this Economy, we need to do just that.

Our CTO and founder, Ron Edison, recently wrote an article for Business Solutions Magazine called Philosophies of Spam Solutions.  It is now being featured on their website and I wanted to give you an excerpt here:

While spam by the billions reaches out to users around the globe, they are scanned, blocked, deleted, sorted, filtered, rejected, quarantined, moved, dropped, replied to, and bounced by a panorama of spam solutions and email systems as varied as they are many. Accompanying the ubiquity of spam is a mixed bag of strategies and applications to deal with it.

And, while users rail at spam, they typically complain far louder about “false positives” (legitimate messages treated, blocked, etc., incorrectly by spam filtering systems) — and for good reason. If there’s anything worse than getting drowned in spam, many users agree, it is missing “that all important message”, which at least seemingly is often subject to collateral damage as servers wage their constant battle with spam. Here there is opportunity for an effective solution as long as it can deliver accuracy.

While spam and its effects have been the topic of endless discourse, rarely mentioned in much detail is the underlying philosophy or even exact goal of one solution or another. Certainly, one could say that — of course — the goal is to block all spam and deliver all “ham” (the colloquial for “legitimate email”), but there is more to this than meets the eye.

Enter “reputation.” (read more)

Been seeing people complain on twitter that the first email they received in 2009 was spam. While I would love to offer each and everyone of those people a trial of our email filtering software (haven’t heard anything from our guys) it is an interesting thing to note.

The “email marketing” and spamming culture in our lives is huge. While there is a big difference between these two things (email marketing versus spamming) to some people, they mean one and the same.

Email is an amazing communication channel that we now use all over the place. It is so fast that we can coordinate virtually anything with counterparts anywhere in the world.

I have several marketing friends, some who are consultants, and I hear them talk about how they are doing email marketing - but not spamming. On a few occasions I have questioned them more thoroughly and have found elements of the way they organizing these email marketing campaigns which could easily get them labeled as spam EVERY TIME.

My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to work out how to broadly “Clean Up the Net”. Hope to announce more on this shortly.

Would also love to hear what the first email you received in 2009 was.

Email spam is just one form of spam. Unfortunately any channel in which communication can flow, gets spam put on it.

Join any social media site and soon you will find people spamming you. Luckily, it is easier to unfriend someone who spams you on social media sites.

What I would recommend is when someone spams you on social media sites there are two courses to take:

1) If it isn’t someone you know well, just a business acquaintance who you won’t miss, unfriend them immediately. Hopefully they will figure it out when they start lossing friends all over the place that they shouldn’t be abusing the network.

2) If it is someone you know better and would like to be connected to, respond back to them and tell them you don’t want their spam and this is their warning. If they do it a second time, then unfriend them.

Wish email spam was as easy.

I get asked this a lot too and did a an early post called How Many People Actually Buy Something from Spam? which covers this subject.

Basically this is a conversion problem.

Say the spammers send out ten thousands (not uncommon number, sometimes more) spam messages and out of that say two people click through and they make money off of them. That is 0.0002% and they made money off of it.

Simple math and a little scary that it doesn’t take that much unfortunately.

That is why we at IDT feel it is so important to push education out. That way the spammers stop making money and stop spamming (hopefully).

Been seeing a lot of people talking about changing their email address to get away from the spam.

They wonder how long before they are going to have to change it again.

There is no set rule on how long it will take to get spam again. This depends on how you use your email address.

Obviously, if you never give it out to anyone you are going to have a pretty clean box. If you only give it to a few friends you trust (and tell them never to give it out) then you are probably ok.

As soon as you start buying stuff on-line, signing up for e-newsletters or put your address up on any webpage (your site, your social network identity, etc.) that is when you start opening yourself up to spam. You can see my other blog post on How Did the Spammer Get My Address? which goes over this in more detail.

So, there is no answer to that question really. It depends on your activities.

Now for the usual part (considering this is an email spam filtering company’s blog) you should just get a great filter that stops the spam from ever reaching you and you don’t have to worry about that. Of course, that means you need to check out ours here.

When you forward email from one address to another this can sometime lead to difficulties with filtering.

The worst example would be having a hotmail email address that you know forward to work or even gmail.

One of the checks that spam filters do is to check and see who the email is coming from (one reason spammers like to fake a real legitimate email as the from). If they see that it is coming from your toher legitimate email address, they won’t check any further.

While any good filter will check more than that, not all of them do and this can lead to you having a lot more spam in your inbox.

Solutions:

* Tell people about the email address change and give everyone a deadline to change over all their records. Examples, my old email address will be off in 6 months please update your records to “new address”, adding this in the footer of your emails out for a little while too.

* Get a better filter that checks much more than where an email is coming from (and there is my plug for our product, of course).