Musings of a Marketing Maven

Like most small business owners, I operate without benefit of an in-house IT function. Unlike most, I was an early adopter of the Internet, and have owned a domain name for almost 15 years. As a consequence my in-box has been infested with spam, despite lots of different spam blockers and my ISP’s attempts to filter out the spam before delivery.

I’ve sought help on this for years, and have gotten an amazing amount of bad advice. (Not worth listing here.) It’s meant that using an iPhone to retrieve email while out of office is a royal pain. People who work within enterprises can hardly imagine how bad it’s gotten for people in smaller firms without perimeter protection.

But now there’s an end to this pain, I hope. I’ve just begun a 30-day trial of an enterprise-class spam blocking service, offered on a hosted basis. The pricing and value prop are reasonable for an SMB enterprise like mine. Two days into the trial, my in-box is unusually clean.

To put things in perspective, before this trial my ISP would trap upwards of 2500-3000 spam messages a week — but another 100-200 would slip through their cracks and end up in my in-box every day. (Or on my iPhone.)

The messages polluting my in-box would include the usual suspects — adult porn or products focused on male virility –sent by spammers spoofing my domain name. Their techniques were technically sophisticated, beyond the ability of client-side anti-spam utilities to block. Given the spoofing, my ISP said there was nothing they could do to help.

Some people had even advised me to give up on my business’ domain name altogether and start over. That was advice that felt like killing the patient in order to eradicate the disease.

But now there’s a smile on my face again. I can use an iPhone to retrieve email without fear of wasting precious time deleting dozens of offensive messages.