The Fight Against Spam
In the current times a simple the mention of the word spam brings up really bad connotations in the mind of most internet users. Before it would make us sick because we thought of that horrifically salty wannabe pork that came in a can, but now it has a whole new, equally terrifying meaning.
What is Spam?
Spam can basically be defined as any unsolicited email sent to you with the intent to sell you something. That can be viagra, dirty website memberships, illegal software, domain name registrations, mortgage loans, you name it. If you can sell it my guess is that there has been a spam sent out related to it.
So Why Do They Do It?
The question for spammers isn’t why, but why not? I would venture a guess that most spammers spam for 1 main reason, and that is the almighty $$$$. The hard fact is that spammers get paid, yes that’s correct, they actually get paid to send those bombs out. If they send 1 million emails selling something, that costs them nothing. If out of that million only 1% buys something, that’s 10,000 people. Generally it wouldn’t be that high, but imagine a company that sells something that’s $5.00. They would make $50,000 with no money really spent for marketing. Are you seeing how it works yet? Not only this, but now they will include your (and our) email address as the sender so you get the bounces when they send to unsuccessful addresses. Please see “mailer-delivery-spam” for more info on this tactic.
How Does Dogbark Prevent it?
Dogbark uses a custom set of in-house filters that were created by our very own staff. We use various sets of detection to ensure that we are blocking as much spam as possible at the server level before you ever see it. Generally speaking we are blocking about 90% of all emails sent to any POP account as spam at the server side. What you will see on your end is that leftover 10% or so.
Spam is a game of cat and mouse. Sometimes we get an attack where it takes our filters a day or two to catch up. Unfortunately, there are some sets of spam that we cannot fully protect against currently without blocking legitimate emails.
Spamming with only a picture means that our filters cannot see what is in the message.
Why? Because it’s hidden in a picture. It’s very similar to CAPTCHA verification on sites. Our machines can’t see it, so we have to let it in. Otherwise all of those nice Photoshop emails, NAPP emails, anything in picture form would have to be blocked.
Spam with foreign languages cannot be blocked simply based on the language it was written in.
Why? Because we most likely have customers speaking that language, so blocking those messages based on that wouldn’t be fair to everyone using our services. It wouldn’t be cool for us to block all English emails would it? If you want to take this kind of spam head-on please see this article about rules and filters.
In Closing:
There are always going to be messages that eek their way through the filters. You’ll always want to rely on your junk mail folders to keep those messages out of your inbox. We live by the philosophy that most of our customers would rather see a few more spams and get all of their legitimate emails than the opposite. For most of us, one missed email can cost a fortune in the creative line of work, so we want to ensure that we don’t falsely block emails that could cost you time and money.
For more information on how to prevent spam please see our “stop spam” page at Dogbark.com. We hope this has helped shed some light on our spamming technology and what we are doing for you. Please email us with questions to info@dogbark.com