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By Dave Peiser

While my previous suggestion of using gmail to block spam is great for one or two email addresses, if you own or run a business with employees,then I believe you really need a solution that not only blocks spam, but also provides the ability to easily manage the solution for everyone. My recommended solution is MX Logic® Email Defense Service.

Why? For just a couple dollars per month per employee, the Email Defense Service provides comprehensive, layered protection against a wide range of email-borne threats.  The service blocks over 99% of spam, so that rather than sifting through 50 or 100 or 500 spam emails each day to check if maybe one good email came through, all you have to do is check a daily email report from MX Logic that lists a few emails the service isn’t sure about. All the emails that are known spam are automatically deleted and you never see them. Only good email comes into your inbox.

The service scans all email for viruses, worms and spyware. Phishing emails are blocked. You can set the service to filter content and attachments. And a recovery service is optionally provided, that will hold all your mail if your email server goes down or your internet connection goes down – and then all the email is released to your email server as soon as it is available again.

You can also filter out-going email if you want.

I like this service because it is easy to use, has very little setup to do, and minimal maintenance. All, while doing exactly what you purchase it for – automatically removing spam from your email, so that you and your employees can use your time for productive, profitable activities.

Interested in learning more? Click Here.

By Dave Peiser

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking for the best solutions for getting rid of spam, also known as junk email. It’s obviously a plague on all who attempt to communicate with email, unless of course, you work for a big company that has spent big bucks to keep the stuff off your network.

For a number of years I’ve recommended client-based solutions; i.e. install software on your PC that looks at all incoming mail and puts the bad stuff in a separate folder or deletes it for you. I am now, however, convinced that the only way to deal with spam is to get rid of it before it gets to your computer or network.

There are a lot of services now available, for low cost, that will clean your email of viruses, spyware and junk email, before sending it on to you, and I will talk about that in a future post. Today, I will talk about a free solution that I implemented for two customers this week. And, that free solution is Google Gmail.

One of my clients, who has their own domain name, that I will call companyname.com for explaining what I did, was set up to use a POP3 type connection for downloading email into Microsoft Outlook. Their email hosting company was doing an awful job filtering out spam. In particular, they had an info@companyname.com address that was on their website for years, and was bombarded with junk. For the info account, I created a Gmail account with the address info.companyname@gmail.com. I set their info@companyname.com address to forward all email to the info.companyname@gmail.com address, and then set Microsoft Outlook to download email from the Gmail account. Incoming spam went from 500 per day to zero!

For another client, who was using Microsoft Exchange Server for their email and was downloading email with a POP3 connection, I needed to take one additional step. Gmail requires an encrypted connection when downloading email, which is not possible using the POP connector in Exchange. So, I created a new account at their web/email host, and set the Gmail account to automatically forward to this new account. Then set the Exchange POP connector to download from the new account. So now, email comes into the publically-known email address, gets sent to Gmail for cleaning, and then gets sent back to the private email address that is brought into Exchange and Outlook.

By the way, I need to thank June Mattiza at the Media Collective for this suggestion.

Cheers!