SPAM and Viruses

You may have noticed a recent increase in the amount of spam you are receiving in your Eastbrook inbox. I have just modified the settings on our filtering service to counteract this latest group of bogus e-mails and am fairly confident that we will see a reduction.

Here are some statistics you may find interesting:

• we received 91,637 messages to eastbrookhomes.com last month
• 68,072 of those messages were blocked as blatant spam
• another 11,865 were quarantined as probable spam
• only 11,700 (12.8%) messages were legitimate
• even using conservative calculations, the filtering software saves us upwards of $2,000 a month in wasted time deleting unwanted messages
• the savings above does not include the potential time and damage caused from a virus infection or other form of malware
• messages go through at least 3 levels of filtering and 2 separate virus checks before they hit your mailbox
  

Here are some tips to help us fight the problem of SPAM:

1. Make sure your anti-virus and anti-spam software is up to date. We obviously take care of this for Eastbrook computers but make sure you are protected at home as well. An excellent software free to home users is Avast. We also have complimentary licenses for Vipre we can set you up with.
   
2. Do not open messages that are clearly spam - just delete them
3. NEVER click on any links from an undesired message - this includes unsubscribe links. at best, clicking on a link legitimizes your address to the source as a legitimate recipient or, worse, unleashes a virus into your system.
4. NEVER respond to spam messages - same reason as #3.
   
5. Use disposable e-mail addresses. Free addresses are easy to obtain and plentiful on the web. Set-up a gmail or yahoo address for the express purpose of using on web forms so that your real address is not input.
6. When you do need to use your real e-mail address, only use it on known reputable sites that have privacy policies and security in place (usually a padlock icon in the status bar)
   
7. NEVER click on attachments!
   
8. Use common sense. If something looks suspicious, don't click on it. Remember - spam and viruses are often sent from infected computers and can appear to be from someone you know. Don't be fooled!
9. Don't forget to check your quarantined messages periodically to ensure that there are no legitimate messages snagged by the servers. No matter how careful we are it is impossible to insure that there are no "false-positives"
10. When you receive a message from a friend or co-worker of a supposed virus outbreak or other warning, do not forward until you have checked it out first. Snopes, McAfee and Symantec all have good searchable databases. You can also Google a portion of the message and get good results. Most of these warnings are hoaxes - Don't add to the problem by forwarding!

Thank you for your help in keeping our systems as spam and virus free as possible.

Make sure you fill-in your e-mail address (yes, your real one) in the box on the right to subscribe to this blog. Not only will I be using it to communicate important information but it has traffic benefits for our site.

Thanks again.

td