Business mentor: Four simple steps to can all that spam

Q. My staff are swamped with junk email. Why are we getting so much and how can we avoid it?

A. Telecom technology commentator Pat Pilcher replies:

Junk internet email, otherwise known as spam, can be a real curse. On average, each of your staff members is likely to receive more than 700 items of spam this year.

As annoying as spam mail may be, don't panic. By following some simple rules it's not too difficult to reduce the amount of junk email down to a more manageable volume.

Spamming is big business on the internet, with millions upon millions of email addresses on-sold to junk emailers every day. The underlying logic of spammers is that of a scattergun approach.

By sending out 10 million spam emails, they aim to cash in on the less than 1 per cent of the people who respond. This translates into sales from over 100,000 people.

Unlike the printed junk mail you receive in your letterbox, there's no printing cost and virtually no postage so it costs almost nothing to send.

So just how dodgy is spam? Since most spam originates from outside New Zealand, and is therefore beyond the reach of consumer protection legislation, avoiding any tempting offers makes sound sense. While major online retailers tend to have a fixed internet abode, spammers tend to be more ethereal, disappearing and reappearing at random.

The range of products and services on sale can range from known brand name goods such as Viagra, through to hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes and scams. Buyer beware - if the spammer takes your money and runs, you're not likely to recover it any time soon.

An ounce of prevention is one of the best ways to avoid junk email. Here are four simple rules that'll help to reduce your in-box being crammed with spam:

1. Don't post your email address publicly in chatrooms or websites. Email addresses are the hard currency of spammers, with millions of email addresses harvested off websites and chatrooms. If you really need to publicly post an email address, set up a secondary email account using a free service such as Hotmail or Yahoo and use that instead.

2. Delete spam, don't respond to it. Responding to spam only confirms that your email address is active and able to be on-sold to other spammers - the end result being that you'll end up receiving even more spam email than you're already getting.

3. Use anti-spam filtering software. Most major email applications such as Outlook usually incorporate spam filters that can weed out spam by searching for common phrases used by spammers. If your email programme doesn't have spam filtering built in, use a capable third-party product such as Norton's Internet Security, which is available from most good PC retailers.

4. For more information on how to deal with spam email, try Fight Spam on the Internet. This website is one of the leading authorities on spam, and is packed with invaluable resources for dealing with it.

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Answers are courtesy of Spring - A State of Mind for Business.