Take back your inbox!
By robbie, posted about 2 years ago. 0 comment(s).
You may have received a chain mail recently from Andy.curran@persimmonhomes.com claiming that Marks & Spencers are giving away up to £500 worth of free vouchers. The e-mail reads as follows:
Marks and Spencers (M&S) free vouchers.
Marks & Spencers, in conjunction with Persimmon Homes, are giving away free vouchers. Marks & Spencers are trying word-of-mouth advertising to introduce its products and the reward you receive for advertising for them is free non-refundable vouchers to be used in any M&S store.
To receive your free vouchers by e-mail all you have to do is to send this email out to 8 people (for £100 of free vouchers) or 20 people (for £500 of free vouchers). Within 2 weeks you will receive an e-mail with your vouchers attached.They will contact you through your e-mail address.
Please mark a copy to Andy.curran@persimmonhomes.com
Just in case it hadn’t already occurred to you, this e-mail is a complete hoax and carrying out the instructions described won’t benefit you in the slightest! Believe it or not, this hoax e-mail first began circulating the web over a year ago and has only recently been making a comeback. Here’s a day-by-day summary of how many times the e-mail is forwarded worldwide.
Whilst forwarding chain e-mails on to your friends might not cause any problems directly, there is one pitfall that most people don’t consider. Every time the e-mail is forwarded on, it retains not only the e-mail address of each person in the “chain”, but also every other person that has been sent a copy of the e-mail. Imagine if the e-mail was to land in the hands of spammers, it would provide them with hundreds of e-mail addresses to add to their hit lists.
To put it quite simply, taking in part in chain e-mails such this could result in you and your friends receiving even more spam on a daily basis.
Spam has become a real problem in recent years, accounting for up to 40% of all e-mail sent worldwide with more than 2.5 terabytes (2 and a half trillion bytes) floating around every day!
Luckily, there are a number of solutions to the problem and one of the most effective of these is being developed by US based Solinus. Entitled “Mail Foundry”, this system is much more than just a simple piece of software.
It comes in the form of a piece of hardware that attaches to your e-mail server. The system connects to central servers every 5 minutes and downloads a list of the latest spammers and nuisance e-mails.
Mail Foundry have spend years developing an unparalleled zero false-positive system that interrogates e-mails and identifies new spam outbreaks as they happen across the world.
Additionally, when a Mail Foundry user receives a spam e-mail, they can report it back to the central servers which will then add the message to the blocked list of every other Mail Foundry server world-wide. This system works incredibly well compared to other solutions.
Here at Internet Essentials, we just got hold of our own Mail Foundry server and can offer this service to anyone who might be interested in trying it out, whether we provide your e-mail services or not!
If you’re interested or would like to know more information, contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
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