A Little Advice for Managing SPAM and Phishing

Although there are other forms of communication in this decade, some that may or may not be more effective, email is still an essential part of business communication. How you manage your inbox may be reflective of how you manage your position or your business. How you manage your inbox may have direct consequences to your livelihood. It certainly does for mine.

The purpose of this blog is to consider some theories and tactics to deal with SPAM and Phishing and general inbox health.

SPAM: It’s not that Bad

For some, getting unsolicited email from non-malicious sources is an annoyance, and for others it is emotionally crippling; for me it is a billboard. Curiously some jurisdictions allow more billboards than others, but I still manage to filter out traffic signals from the noise and make it to my destination without getting plastic surgery or pizza and not needing a personal injury lawyer … most of the time.

My advice for most SPAM is to hit delete and move on with business. You can probably identify most SPAM in an instant, so the effort and cost to pre-filter your email may not be worth it. Secondly, if there is an unsubscribe link in the email, use it; in the past unsubscribe links were just a gimmick, now they are legislated.

Third, use a blocklist if you are getting emails from a specific person, they won’t stop, and there isn’t an unsubscribe link. Don’t bother with a blocklist if you can’t identify emails coming from the same sender regularly.

Phishing: It IS that Bad

Phishing is terrible, read my bog about it here. Bad as it is, you have little control about what arrives in your inbox. Your email service provider has tools to block more malicious email than you are aware of, but still some gets through. However, adding the sender of a phishing email to a blocklist is pointless, almost as pointless as warning your desk neighbor about the email you got. Senders and content that you get rarely repeat in your inbox let alone somebody else’s inbox. That being said, the worst phishing is when somebody you know gets hacked and the hacker sends you and everybody else in their contact list a phishing message; that’s one you can warn your colleagues about.

False Positives: The Innocent Bystanders

A false positive is when your email service provider incorrectly marks a message as SPAM and it doesn’t arrive in your Inbox. In a perfect world there would be no SPAM, or phishing, or billboards, or junk mail, or politicians; but people of low moral standards abound, and as a result assumptions are made, and some email gets falsely accused. I recommend occasionally checking your Junk Email (Microsoft 365 Email) or your SPAM folder (Google Mail) for things that you may have missed. Coincidentally, while writing this email I got a false positive; I’m considering a hack on email account that would drop every SPAM or unfiltered phishing message directly into my mailbox.

An alternative to my kneejerk reaction would be a whitelist. Using a whitelist can ensure that mail from a specific sender always arrives. In Outlook, this is called a Safe Senders list. In the essence of time and laziness, see two links below with instructions on how to use whitelisting.
3rd Party Instructions for Outlook Caveat, Microsoft’s safe sender list doesn’t always work.
3rd Party Instructions for Google Mail

As always Pluto Micro is happy to help you with your SPAM, phishing, and whitelisting. In many cases, we can tweak the backend settings of your email service provider to block more, block less, or not block at all (whitelist).