The Simple Spam-Killer

Nothing is a more monumental waste of time then sitting at your desk in the morning and filtering through 157 viagra, cialis, levitra, and get rich stock emails. I estimate that a person could essentially waste 1-4 seconds a day per spam mail they have to deal with, either by deleting or by adding to a "junk mail filter." If you have 50 of these a day on average, then realize you could inevitably we wasting a good amount of time just deailing with junk.

A client of mine sat with me and did a calculation, once, on how much time he spends dealing with junk email each day. Turns out, he was burning almost 20 minutes a day dealing with the incessant spam that came to him. His company employs about 150 people - so let's say all 150 spent the same amount of time dealing with that junk each day. How much time is being wasted?

I am a big fan of efficiency. Everything I do with my business is process and document driven. When I go in to an organization and see such a blatant waste of time in terms of dealing with junk mail it blows my mind because spam is such an easy thing to eliminate and the payoff is huge!

My advice is simple - do one of the following:

I. The best option is to invest in a service that filters and tests your email before it even gets to your organization, whether or not you are hosting your email in your office. This is typically one of the most expensive options, but also the most effective. Good anti-spam services will typically run anywhere from 30-60 independent spam tests on each email that comes through.

II. Having anti-spam and anti-virus services on the server that provides your email services is the next best thing. If you host email in your office, then this requires you purchase software to provide the filtering. This costs less than option I, however understand that the spam still gets to your server in some fashion and you are relying on software to eliminate it.

III. Running anti-spam software on your personal computer is the cheapest in terms of software costs, but I would say most of my clients who do this end up seeing little value over time. The software has to be maintained and tweaked by the user and is usually not very intuitive. I never usually recommend this option unless we are talking about a single user with little spam.

If you are having spam problems, stop procrastinating and do something to eliminate it. Honestly, with all the facets of your business that require fine tuning and improvement - eliminating spam has big and immediate payoff compared to its minimal solution cost. For more information, have a look at http://www.vcsolutions.com/spam_filter.php to see how my company does it.