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Guest post by: Adam Ford Become an Author

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Spam’s prominence is undeniable. It bogs down your email and keeps you sifting through messages, often making you delete more emails in one day than you will read in a whole week.

For smaller businesses, spam concentrations can be especially high. ACF Consulting Inc., a company providing spam protection and other internet solutions, reports consistently blocking at least 75% of their client emails that are flagged as spam! Many weeks, spam concentration can spike to over 90% of all incoming email. In fact, over any given week, ACF reports having very rarely seen spam rates drop below 50%.

The Two Reasons That Smaller Businesses Have Such High Spam Concentration
1. It is a good practice for smaller businesses to have their emails easily accessible through their website and other avenues, allowing convenient customer contact. The trouble is, this leaves the business vulnerable to harvesters, collecting these email addresses for spam.
2. For a variety of reasons, smaller businesses often do not take the proper steps to protect themselves from spam. They may worry about cost or security. Unfortunately, they may not realize that if they continue unprotected, the problem will only become worse as more and more harvesters collect their email addresses.

Spam Is More Than an Inconvenience

Everyone knows that sifting through emails to find the legitimate messages is a tedious process, cutting down on a business’ efficiency. You and your employees may only be spending a few minutes a day sifting through junk mail but over time this can add up to hundreds of hours of lost work time! Spam also greatly contributes to a slower internet connection as it clogs your bandwidth as well as increasing ware and tear to your network.

Many do not realize that spam poses a real and potentially disastrous threat to a business’ systems. Along with annoying advertisements and chain letters, spam is one of the prominent ways to spread viruses. Without the proper protection, these viruses can all but destroy a small business’ systems, invariably causing strained client relations and often costing thousands of dollars to fix. This threat becomes greater with every day a business is unprotected and they allow more spammers to find them.

A greater danger comes with phishing, a recent trend that has become extremely popular with spammers and shows no sign of stopping. The spammer will send you a link to a website that is an exact replica of one of your financial institutions or other secure site. They will claim an error has been made, asking you for your account information. If you or any of your system-users provide this information, the financial security of your company can be ruptured, identities may be stolen, and all of your business’ secure information may be exposed.

How to Protect Your Business

The only truly effective way for a smaller business to protect themselves against spam and the threats that come along with it is through the use of a fully functional spam filter. Although many of the threats that have been outlined may seem farfetched, criminal activities conducted through spam are reported every day and they often can result in disaster. Spam filtering pays for itself in more than peace of mind. It provides efficiency and security from real threats.

With the right spam blocker, your business may get more than you expected. With the spam filter offered by professional providers you can get more than a blocker that will stop 97% of all spam from ever being delivered. You can also receive blocker analytics that are updated 500-1500 times daily, antivirus engines, personalized security options, and a variety of other services that will protect your business from threats without any hassle.

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