Small Business Essentials

Today’s post is a montage dedicated to SPAM: what it is, why it’s bad, how to prevent it, how to not send it, and what happens when people just can’t take it anymore. Enjoy!

The Definition of Spam

When most people think of spam, they think of bulk emails with odd subjects, like “Enjoy your wanted meds” and “The most insane action”, but spam can come in many forms: bulk e-mail, unwanted/soliciting e-mail, junk blog comments, forum spam, text messaging from unknown senders, and so on. Simply put, it’s the abuse of electronic media to send other people something that they don’t want.

Spam comes with many costs that most people don’t consider. These costs can include:

• Wasted Time.
  I get several hundred spam messages a day. This means that I spend a significant portion of my workweek dealing with spam instead of actually doing productive work. If you multiply that by everyone else getting the same amount of spam, it adds up to a serious hit to our economy. Additionally, practices like spamming search engines, forums and blogs waste the time of the staff that have to deal with them as well as the people searching for information that have to sort through multiple pages of spam to find what they are looking for.
• Hardware costs.
  On an average day, I get 1-10 spam messages for every legitimate message. This means that my e-mail provider must give me at least 10 times the amount of mail storage capacity that I would require if I wasn’t getting any spam. This concept works across the board—blog and forum spam requires extra server space to handle the increased database load, text messaging spam requires additional infrastructure to handle the load, search engine spam requires additional server farms, and so on.
• Software costs.
  Developing software that can prevent and handle spam is expensive, and it must be updated frequently to stay ahead of the spammers’ capabilities.
• Payroll costs.
  Who handles all this spam? Your employees, from your IT staff right down to every user on your network who deletes spam messages from their inbox on company time.
• Theft losses.
  Malicious spam, usually in the form of phishing scams, is responsible for personal losses such as credit card fraud and identity theft. These personal losses also work on a corporate level for the fraud teams that handle these kinds of cases at banks, credit card companies, and other financial institutions.
• Legal fees.
  The cost of fighting spam through legal means, both criminal and civil, is paid both by private companies and taxpayers. Our government spends both time and money fighting spam that could be allocated to other resources.

The bottom line is this: Spam costs us all! So what can we do to prevent it and fight it?

Anti-Spam Technology

After updating and relaunching this site, I began to receive numerous spam comments on my posts. To combat this, I installed a piece of software based on CAPTCHA technology. The idea behind CAPTCHA is to use a simple task to tell a computer and a human apart. For the most part with blogs, humans are legitimate posters, and computers are automated spamming devices. I am using a piece of code called reCAPTCHA, which fights spam while also digitizing printed material! (I don’t have space to explain this here, so check out the link—it’s pretty cool.)

For your e-mail, many programs contain spam filtering. I use gmail for my e-mail servers, which does a pretty good job of spam filtering. The real problem with spam filters, however, is not the ones the filter misses that get through—it’s the accidental legitimate e-mails that the filter catches. I found that out a while back when I got PM from Rich Sloan in the StartupNation Community, asking me why I wasn’t responding to his e-mails. Apparently Google decided he was a spammer for a few weeks and was filtering out his e-mails! (I told gmail to mark them as not spam and it seemed to resolve itself, so the technology can learn.)

How to NOT SPAM Anyone, Ever

This blog uses FeedBurner to distribute posts in a newsletter-like fashion. To get on this list, you must sign yourself up and confirm your subscription. I use this same technology for a lot of my clients, and I can’t tell you how many have asked how to import their mailing lists into FeedBurner. The answer is this: You can’t. This is opt-in technology. Your users have to sign themselves up—you can’t just toss them on your list. This is the way it should be! Here are a few of my tips on how to not become a spammer yourself:

• Don’t purchase lists, and don’t sell your list.
  Building a list from the ground up is time-consuming but it is just a fact of life for businesses these days. Purchasing a list guarantees that you will end up sending unwanted advertisements to people who did not ask to be on your list. EVEN IF this practice is somewhat effective for you because 10% of this list buys from you, you have just spammed the other 90% of the people. (Refer to the costs above and quit being so selfish!) The only exception to this rule is if you are submitting material to an already-established list whose readers have chosen to receive information from you. An example of this is an opt-in list which asks its users if they would like to receive information from related 3rd party companies.
• Only send e-mail to people who expect it.
  The worst offense is people who send large attachments to unsuspecting victims. If you don’t know who the e-mail should go to at a company, or if they will be interested in your business/product/pitch/information, do your research or pick up the phone and ask!
• Don’t spam your friends.
  When clients of mine launch a new company, they often have a list of family, friends, former colleague and business associates that they want to tell. Go ahead and group your contacts and send each group a tailored message about your launch, but you only get to do it ONCE. After that, they can sign up for your newsletter or updates if they want to. (Encourage signing up by making it easy and giving them a valuable reason to do so.) If they don’t sign up, let it go.

For more tips, see the resources section below.

When SPAM Pushes You Over the Edge

To end this article on a slightly funny note, I think it’s worth mentioning a few recent extreme spam-fighting measures.

Our first comes from Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, who got so fed up with spam that he decided to post a long list of people who have recently spammed him. The even longer discussion in the comments that follow is just priceless.

Our second link comes from a guy who was unfortunately given a very common name. So common, in fact, that he’s been privy to way too much information about other people. Read about it in Return to Sender.

Additional Resources

• Nine ways to combat spam
  Note: Writing your email as "name [AT] domain [DOT] com" really doesn’t work anymore. The automated e-mail harvesters have wised up to that practice.
• Best Practices to Help Prevent Spam
  with Microsoft Outlook
• Security and privacy 101: how to prevent spam
  from HP
• WordPress SPAM Tools
• Preventing Comment Spam
  from Google
• Proper Usage of Forums, Blogs and Mailing Lists,
  part of my 5 Steps to Marketing Your Website series at StartupNation
• Preventing spam on your website without using captcha