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.

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