TECH@WORK: E-Mail

BY STEPHEN M. CANALE

Defending your inbox

Fight back: Show spammers your mettle.

As mass marketers, con artists, and virus purveyors ramp up their junk e-mail capabilities, it’s not uncommon to spend half your online time reviewing messages you don’t even want to receive. And junk e-mail will only get worse; many researchers, including Gartner Inc., expect spam will soon account for more than 50 percent of e-mail.

Members of the U.S. Congress are proposing ways to combat spam, including a do-not-spam registry, similar to a national do-not-call registry. But even with anti-spam laws in place, you’ll need to fortify your inbox.

Quick fixes
To reduce the amount of junk e-mail you receive:

• Consider using one e-mail address on your site. Although multiple addresses may make it easier to track the source of your leads, they often result in receiving multiple copies of each piece of spam.
• Use forms for visitors to communicate with you rather than just listing your e-mail address at the bottom of your Web page. Some e-mail-gathering software can’t harvest your address from a form.
• Never unsubscribe from questionable e-mail. Unscrupulous companies use your removal request to verify your address and send you more junk.
  
  More drastic measures
  If these solutions don’t decrease the volume of your spam sufficiently, invest in software designed to help you fight back. The best of the breed:
• MailWasher Pro (www.mailwasher.net) lets you preview the subject lines from your e-mail, then mark messages for deletion at the server or for bouncing back to the senders. (Bouncing returns the message to the sender as if it were undeliverable, in the hope of tricking senders into removing you from their list.) The $29.95 program also takes a stab at analyzing whether a message is spam. Once you’ve cleared out the junk, you can then proceed to download the e-mail you actually want. There’s also a feature that lets you set up simple filters to automatically eliminate specified types of e-mail based on size, verbiage in the subject line, and other factors. MailWasher works with most e-mail programs, although not with AOL.
• Matador, from MailFrontier Inc. (www.mailfrontier.com), is one of the most effective—if also one of the more onerous—programs for blocking spam. It works by automatically sending a challenge response to the sender of every incoming e-mail. Each sender must correctly answer a question such as, “How many fish are there in the picture I sent you?” Otherwise the e-mail is deleted from your inbox or from the server before you see it. Another drawback is that this $29.95 program works only with Outlook and Outlook Express.
• OnlyMyEmail (www.onlymyemail.com) takes an altogether different approach by checking your e-mail for you and removing both unwanted spam and viruses automatically. What makes the service work is the high level of control you have over the types of e-mail you want to receive. You can specify if you want to receive newsletters, listservs, and other options, as well as create an address book of acceptable e-mail addresses. This flexibility makes the program a good option for practitioners who receive vital information from their associations and franchises via e-mail. The site’s zero-false-positives policy also helps ensure that you don’t erase client mail by mistake.
  
  Another plus is the sign-up-and-forget-about-it convenience of the program, which costs $2 to $3 per month based on the plan. You subscribe to the service, and the anti-spam survey runs on Onlymyemail’s server. The program works with virtually all e-mail programs, including AOL.
  
  Test spam-blocking programs by sending messages to yourself from different computers to spot quirks that might inadvertently impede clients. Just one lost relationship can be more expensive and more damaging than any problem spam creates.
  
  In addition to instructing GRI programs, Canale has spoken at hundreds of seminars in 42 states over the past several years, covering a variety of subjects relating to real estate sales and technology. For information about his products, newsletter, and seminars, visit www.canale.com.

ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

For information on NAR’s e-PRO® certification, which covers spam filtering, click here.

FACTOID:

An estimated 66 percent of spam e-mail is false in some way. And more than 90 percent of spam involving investment and business opportunities contains false or misleading information.

—Federal Trade Commission