Find Time to Weed Out Spam

The Time Finder with Paula Eder

The way you use your time is the way you live your life.

Find Time to Weed Out Spam

Posted on April 6, 2009, under Time and Technology.

I hope you had a wonderful weekend! As the sun rises on this Cyber Monday at The Time Finder, I find myself awash in spam (again). Needing to find time to deal with this is frustrating – but it is a reality of on-line work.

This time it’s not in the blog, thankfully. Since April 1 we have had an onslaught of spammers signing up for our Finding Time Tips and E-zine. Have you seen an increase in spam on your sites and in your e-mail, too, this month? We take a deep breath and do what we need to – but it surely feels annoying and invasive, as each sneaky e-mail lands on our server and has to be dealt with!

According to Wikipedia, Spam is “the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast mediums, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately.” The most common form of spam is e-mail spam. In 2007, the California legislature estimated that spam “cost United States organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.”

Those are staggering figures, reflecting a terrible waste of time and money! In our research, we found that, in keeping with our experience, there has been a significant and accelerating increase in spam over the past several months, following the closing of a major spam source back in November of 2008.

We found an excellent site called Stop Forum Spam that can help you recognize spammers either by IP Address, Username, or E-mail address. Using this tool we found that our recent onslaught has its origins in Sweden, of all places!

Another helpful site is Spamhaus – an international anti-spam non-profit based in Switzerland. They maintain comprehensive databases of spammers which are updated in real time, 24/7. SpamCop is another site that tracks spammers. Here is a list that they maintain (again, real time) of ISP addresses that have been sources of spam within the past 30 minutes. As you can see, the traffic is high!

What do you do when you receive a spam e-mail? You can report it, using services like SpamCop. And you should definitely delete it. It is also a good idea to never open a suspicious-looking e-mail (and never click on a link in one)!

NOTE: The address for SpamCop is http://www.spamcop.net/. Apparently there are malicious copy cat sites masquerading as the real SpamCop. Be careful!

Have you had much experience with spam? How do you deal with it (and how do you feel about it)? I invite you to write a comment or drop me a line (paula@thetimefinder.com) – I’d love to hear!

What if you could find another hour every day? You can! For more Time Finding resources, you are invited to sign up and download The New Finding Time Boundary Template. It’s FREE, and when you sign up you will also receive (if you don’t already) my FREE, weekly Finding Time Tips and my FREE, monthly Award-Winning Finding Time E-zine!

Let’s explore time together …

Paula's Signature

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