To all Edge Impact email facility users                 Aug 2007

There has been a tremendous increase in the amount of SPAM emails being received by all email users on the Internet in recent months, and we are not the exception. It is not limited to our facility or the UK. It is worldwide and it has been reported on the news.

The spammers have been getting more and more wise as to how to get around spam checking software which is why so many spam emails are currently getting through.

Some articles referring to it are as follows:

http://www.cmsconnect.com/Praetor/Press/pressSPamTacticsChanging.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_(electronic) – search for “July 2006”

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11420

www.edgeimpact.co.uk/spam_email_case.asp - Successful Legal Case in the UK

Edge Impact do not provide PC support or advice on the purchase of PC software. We do however suggest you try some or all of the following.

What not to do:

1. Do not select the option to be removed from their distribution lists. This will only give them a legitimate email address to send email to.
2. Do not reply to the email requesting the sender to remove you from the emailing list. Most of the time these emails have used a “From:” address which is not theirs.
3. Do not register your email address on dodgy websites.
4. Do not provide your email address to people who are going to sell the contact data on to anyone who wants to purchase it. An example of this is the registration at some exhibitions. If you need to provide an email address for this purpose then setup a temporary email address (using your supplied email Control Panel) and monitor the email coming into the email box.

What can you do about it?

1. Use a product like Microsoft Outlook which puts junk emails into a “Junk E-mail” folder therefore reducing the amount of email you have to go through.
2. Install an anti virus/SPAM filtering product like Norton’s or MacAfee on your computer (ask your PC support person for a recommendation).
3. Ensure your virus/SPAM software is updated with the latest changes on a daily basis. This can be done for Norton’s by clicking LiveUpdate. The latest list of viruses can be downloaded from http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/download/pages/US-N95.html. It is Edge Impact’s policy to run Norton’s LiveUpdate and to download and run the latest virus list on the website above on every computer at the start of every day and before doing anything else on any computer.
4. Have Edge Impact install SPAM filtering on individual accounts at a cost of £20 pa plus vat each (approximately £1.67 a month or 5p a day, plus vat) . Note that this will not eliminate all SPAM because spammers are continually finding ways around anti-spam software. Anti-spam software is updated from time to time to solve this problem, however in the interim spam emails will be received by users. If you want this facility, please email support@edgeimpact.co.uk with the list of email addresses you want SPAM filtering applied to and whether you want the SPAM automatically deleted or to be sent to you with the subject suffix of “------- SPAM --------“.
5. Use your Edge Impact email Control Panel to set the Undeliverable Email forwarding to an email box which you can either look at using the webmail facility we provide you or download this email directly into a separate folder in Outlook (by setting up a rule – “Tools/Rules and Alerts”. If you have a problem with this then review the Outlook help or contact your PC support person). Note: Do not forget to have all email sent from your website go to a legitimate email address which you monitor.
6. If you receive email from anyone which has lots of email addresses, including your own,in the To: or Cc: fields on the email, ensure you ask the sender to use the Bcc: field instead so that your email address is not distributed to everyone.
7. You can look at the Internet Headers of emails by opening the email and selecting View/Options. This will tell you which IP address the email is coming from. You can then determine who the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is and forward the email to them together with the Internet Header information, requesting them to remove the senders facilities. This however may have the opposite effect, particularly if the email is from an unscrupulous ISP or from a country where there are no regulations. For information on understanding Internet Header information, please contact your PC support person.
8. Forward the original email to the ISPs that provide the spammers facilities. Include the email headers otherwise the associated ISPs will not be able to track the source of the email and will ignore your request. You can get to the email header information by opening the original email (if you received an “undeliverable” email notification then you need to open the attached email if there is one) and in Outlook go to View/Options and copy the content in the Internet Headers box. Forwarded emails do not contain the original header information and most abuse type notification email addresses will automatically delete attachments so you can't just attach the original email to your email. To determine the source of the emails is a bit cryptic. The order of the header lines is reversed so start from the bottom and work up to just above any reference to your domain name - you will see domain addresses in the format "xxxx.net" and IP numbers like 190.130.189.199. Copy all of these and go to www.hexillion.com and right at the bottom of the page paste them into the field, one at a time, and click GO. Look through the resultant display and copy all email addresses into your To: field of your email and send the email. You are welcome to include some content from our page http://www.edgeimpact.co.uk/telephone_fax_mail_email_marketing.asp. Unfortunately there is nothing much you can do to stop people using your domain address as the From in their emails. BT have now tightened up on sending emails out with From addresses by requiring the original user and password to be entered in the account definition however most people in the world are not connected to BT and just send out what ever they like and From anyone, besides I am not sure that once you have entered the original account information in BT and send an email from someone else that there is any checking at all - although if there is a complaint there may be a way for BT to track where it came from. There is no way that we can stop this happening because your domain merely receives the email being sent to it. We can up the spam block level on your anti-spam facility for your email address above the normal setting (see 4. above) however you may miss some legitimate email if we do.

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