A customer's tip for minimizing spam

Spam. That evil word that sucks the life out of our day, clogs our bandwidth, shocks our sensibilities and yet it still keeps on coming.

Frank Urro, CEO of Vanquish Labs, has a blog all about stopping spam and protecting yourself against viruses and worms. He offers a package of strategies,  in a recent post titled The Suite to Control Spam, for just that purpose: controlling spam.

Here are his 5 strategies:

1) Filters. The egregious spam, and/or visibly apparent, will be dealt with at this stage. Your filter should be personal, self-learning, and require no updates from a central source.

2) White Lists. Everyone on this list will be allowed access...

3) Subject Match. This enhancement will allow someone, completely unknown to you, to reply to an email subject you initiated.

4) Surf Match. This enhancement will allow you to surf to a site, submit your email address and feel confident the site can deliver the information you requested.

5) Sender Confirmation. If your filter makes an error and the sender is not White Listed, a Confirmation Request will instantly alert the sender with instructions of how to release their email for delivery to you. This process stop spammers, because spammers don't use real email addresses and so, non-spammers never see the Confirmation Request.

I've seen and used each of these as a sender and recipient. Together they make a powerful strategy for minimizing the impact of spam on your life.

The strategies in his list do not comprise a complete list. It clearly avoids offering any strategies, tactics or resources that may result in black listing entire communities because as tempting as that may sound...spammers have learned how to play these systems with their goal being to create a false- positive nitemare for the users [that means us] resulting in loss of mail from desirable contacts.

Vanquish Labs offers simple, affordable, award-winning anti-spam products with anti-virus protection built right in!

Frank and his company, Vanquish Labs, have been a customer of ours since 2001. We're happy to share news of their service solutions for that vexing problem of spam.

Let us know your solutions for spam.

And if, as a customer of Conference Calls Unlimited,  you have stories of your company and its products you'd like us to share with our customers...let us know. Just leave a comment here and we'll contact.