Spam isn’t just that stubborn, repetitive sales email you don’t remember having ever subscribed to. Or the request for help from a prince from a faraway land who was tricked by his family into poverty.

Spam is basically anything that clogs your business inbox and slashes your productivity. But can also pose security risks or even damage your company’s reputation if it’s you who does it unwittingly.

It’s one more thing: a scourge that almost never completely disappears. Where there’s internet access, there’s spam too. That, however, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t even try to fight it. Quite the contrary!

Here are some easy yet effective steps that ANY business can take, whatever the size or means of your operation, to protect yourself from others but also others from yourself.

1. Filters Are the First Line of Defense

The first thing you need is reliable email filtering solution.

These tools act like a firewall of sorts that can block most unwanted emails before they ever reach your inbox. They do this by deploying sophisticated algorithms to detect suspicious content, spam keywords, known malicious senders, or even new senders that are as yet unverified.

Google’s Gmail and Microsoft Outlook come pre-equipped with strong spam filtering, but you may want to look into advanced options for more robust protection. We won’t be mentioning any here, but there are tonnes!

Case studies show that businesses that use dedicated spam filters experience a significant reduction in spam volume, which boosts their productivity and reduces the risk of phishing attacks.

2. Educate!

Even though most attacks are automated nowadays, 99% of them rely on one main factor to exploit: human error.

Take phishing as an example. This type of attack tries to exploit the recipient’s trust in a brand that they are trying to impersonate. Usually, they do this by using almost exactly the same design and wording, with tiny and almost unnoticeable differences (such as writing zero instead of capital o in the domain name).

This is why educating your employees to identify spam messages can go a long way in preventing potential security breaches.

Some features of spam emails include:

• Unknown senders
• Poor grammar or spelling errors
• Suspicious, weird or otherwise irrelevant links or attachments
• Requests for personal or financial information

You don’t need training sessions that are regular as in ‘once a month’. But a yearly webinar on email safety can help your team stay alert and aware of the ever-evolving nature of spam and phishing attacks. Encourage employees to be cautious when clicking on links or downloading attachments from unknown sources.

3. Know Your Laws

Did you know that what spammers do is not only annoying and potentially unsafe, but also downright illegal?

That’s right. Australia has strict anti-spam laws under the Spam Act 2003, as well as the ensuing Spam Regulations from 2021.

These regulations say that any commercial electronic messages, such as marketing emails, must include 2 things: clear consent from recipients, and an easy way to unsubscribe.

This isn’t just important to know so that you could protect yourself from others, but also the other way round! Many businesses fail to be compliant just because they aren’t aware of these regulations.

But this kind of compliance isn’t just about avoiding legal penalties. It also builds trust with customers. In other words, showing that your business respects privacy and is committed to following anti-spam laws can enhance your brand’s reputation.

4. Where Are You Listing Your Email Address?

Have you ever wondered why many businesses don’t have email addresses listed on their website? Instead, when you want to reach out to them, you have to do it via contact forms and the like. It’s the site visitor who has to leave their email address to the business, and not the other way round.

That’s because reducing the visibility of your business email addresses is another effective way to minimise spam. Cybercriminals often scrape websites and directories to collect email addresses for spamming.

And it’s not like they have a person who does it manually. To do it at scale, they use specialised software that can scrape tens of thousands websites every day.

To combat this, you should:

• Use contact forms on websites instead of listing email addresses publicly.
• Encode email addresses through HTML or Java so that they are harder for bots to scrape.
• Avoid posting business emails on your social media.

By limiting exposure, you reduce the chances of being targeted by spammers who rely on scraping tools to build their email lists.

5. Who Do You Associate With?

A lesser-known yet equally important aspect of spam prevention is maintaining your business’s online reputation.

What this means is, if your domain has a rep of being associated with spam, emails that are being sent from it could trigger the recipients’ junk filters or even be blocked entirely. Even if you’d never meant it or weren’t aware of it!

Of course, there are tools you can use to keep track of your digital footprint and the ways your reputation suffers or not. They’ll give you insights into how your emails are being perceived by different ISPs (internet service providers).

But it’s not just that the emails you receive can taint your rep. It’s also the vendors you partner with. If your partner companies have poor email practices, they can tarnish your business’s credibility by association.

One of our former clients, a reputable Central Coast landscaping company, told us that they got flagged as spam after unknowingly partnering with a third-party service that violated email regulations.

“The first thing we noticed was that our email deliverability tanked all of a sudden! It took us ages to find out that our third-party vendor wasn’t verifying email addresses before adding them to the list,” tells us Aaliyah Glenn from Central Coast Landscaping. Their vendor wasn’t even aware that what they doing would be deemed spammy, so they didn’t clean their list of addresses that had bounced. “Of course, they stopped the practice right away, but it took months to reflect on our situation and stop slashing our legitimate clients.”

This serves as a powerful reminder that your business is only as strong as its weakest link when it comes to email reputation management.

6. Always Keep Your Email Lists up to Date

This tip is a logical consequence of the previous one.

If a contact bounces, there’s a reason why they did. Not to mention if they unsubscribed!

Many businesses will also monitor the open rate and remove inactive subscribers who never ever open their emails. After all, if someone isn’t interested so much to give a single click to your email, they aren’t very likely to buy from you. You can try to warm them up by sending a targeted campaign that’s tailored to grab their attention or ask them if they are still interested to receive your messaging. And if they stay silent or passive, you can remove them from the list.

Similarly, if an address is no longer valid or active, purge it from the list. All too often, people mistakenly think that an invalid address won’t hurt anything. Sure, its ex-owner won’t mind, but the spam filters will. They’ll read into it as a negligent behaviour on your part, and they’ll act accordingly.

7. Become a Verified Sender

Many email marketing solutions will automatically authenticate your emails using Domainkeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and omain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC). That’s the sole reason why we’re leaving this tip for the end. Many businesses will have authenticated already without even knowing.

However, you shouldn’t put all your trust onto software to make sure you’re compliant.

After all, there’s a reason why Gmail and Yahoo introduced authentication as a must starting February 2024 for anyone who sends to over 5,000 addresses.

The long and short of these acronyms is that they cryptographically confirm that your content hasn’t been tampered with or forged, or that you aren’t being impersonated as a sender.

Conclusion

Spam still is, and always will be, a significant challenge to Australian as well as any other businesses. However, it IS possible to significantly reduce its impact. From using filtering tools to educating your employees and keeping your email lists clean, taking a proactive stance on spam management can save your business time, money, and headaches. Remember, a strong digital reputation is key, and being mindful of the companies you partner with is crucial in maintaining that trustworthiness.