We've all been affected by it, some more than others, but in the end it's here to stay. We're talking about SPAM - those unsolicited emails which permeate even the most secure inboxes.
According to the Australian Government's Net Alert website, SPAM comes under a number of classifications including:
• Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) which usually advertises a product or service.
• Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) which is used for things like lobbying.
• Chain letters and pyramid schemes and emails relating other fraudulent schemes such as phishing.
• Messages sent to a recipient who had agreed to receive mail but has subsequently opted-out
• Any email without an Opt-out facility.
• Where an Opt-out facility is provided but it is deliberately misleading or difficult to activate.
• Any email that does not have a valid address in the reply to line.
Upon receiving a spam email, particularly from unknown senders, it's important not to open it and never to reply to it as you risk being targeted even further. The best tactic is to ignore and delete. For any emails from legitimate Australian organisations where you have previously 'opted out' but are still receiving emails or have never 'opted in' to receiving emails, you should reply and ask to be removed from the mailing list immediately. Failing this, you can visit the Australian Communications and Media Authority website and lodge a complaint.
At Lateral Systems, we recently improved our spam filtering functionality and for those of you who use our email service, you may have noticed that many of your emails are now tagged as SPAM Low, SPAM Medium or SPAM high. The filtering looks for obvious indicators of spam and tags them appropriately. On rare occasions, however, it may inadvertently tag legitimate emails, so it's important to check the sender and title details of the emails themselves to ensure that no legitimate emails are deleted.
The marked emails should automatically filter to a junk email folder, but if not you can always set up a rule to have them moved automatically into a nominated folder.
Follow these steps for Microsoft Outlook (most email programs follow a similar procedure for setting rules).