…and what you can do about it.
You must have had at least one of those conversations where someone says to you “didn’t you get my email?”
Or maybe you’ve had an angry email from a customer saying something like “SECOND REQUEST: Why haven’t you answered my email?!?” and when you check, you find you have answered it, and several days ago too.
Well, it never got there thanks to their ISP spam filters.
It’s a real problem now, and especially since about October / November time, I’ve noticed a sharp increase on the number of emails that don’t get through either to me or back to my customers.
I’m pretty sure I know why this is. The increased number of spam emails containing images is causing a major problem for the ISPs.
This is what happens. Even before an email arrives at your email account – so this is even before your own spam filter gets a chance to operate – the mail provider you’re using has already applied its own filters.
Now imagine you’re the ISP, and you get a million emails a day through your network, and they’re all about 6k in size. 750,000 of those are spam, and it’s a burden. I’m making these figures up by the way…
As an ISP, every bit of network traffic costs you money. So all that spam is costing you money with no benefit to either you or your customers. Almost no-one wants it.
(Yes, some people click those links, enough to make it profitable, otherwise the spammers wouldn’t bother. They’re the ones who are really to blame.)
The next thing you know, the spammers are now sending email with images inside, bringing up the average size of an email to 18k. So suddenly, you now have to deal with 3 times as much traffic on your network as before.
What would you do if you were an ISP?
Well as a result of this increased bandwidth usage through junk mail, they’ve had to tighten up on their network filters.
And now you might be thinking “So why do I still get spam?”
Well the spammers are professionals. They’re constantly looking at ways of getting emails through any filter at all. And that’s what they’re good at.
But you and me are just ordinary people trying to make a living off the net.
We don’t stand a chance. Any stray combination of words may trigger a spam filter, we don’t know what might cause it, and so we lose out.
Now apply what I’ve described above, happening to you in a business situation where you have customers you’re trying to hold a conversation with.
It’s a disaster.
This is why my support desk software Ticket Desk Pro is now more useful to me than email.
Any ticket raised gets answered, and even if the automated notification message to my customer doesn’t get through to them, they’ll still see their reply when they come back to check up on what’s going on.
So if you want to beat what the spammers have done to you, grab a copy of Ticket Desk Pro now, and set your business running smoothly again.
-Frank Haywood
