If you haven’t received an email from someone asking you to buy their latest and greatest digital device or some other product that promises to help you lose weight and look younger in twenty-four hours then consider yourself not part of the world population.

We’ve all received these emails either through our email mailboxes or via text messages on our cell phones. And in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s called spamming.

Spamming involves massive distributions of email messages to recipients that number in the thousands to tens of thousands. All the spammers need is for one percent to five percent of the recipient pool to open their spam messages to get their message out there. That one percent to five percent can translate into 20 to 50 persons for a small sampling of 2,000 recipients to upwards of 200 to 1,000 people on the high end sampling of 20,000 recipients. And it doesn’t cost the spammers anything more than the keystrokes needed to send out their burst of emails and the costs associated with the harvesting of email addresses which is another subject altogether.

So how can an administrator protect their enterprise from being the subject of these email spamming campaigns?

Well, here are six best ways to protect your enterprise end users from spammers.

1. Warn your end users not to use their corporate email addresses when responding to forums or newsgroups in public mainstream forums.

Studies have shown that users who post on public internet sites using their corporate email addresses are more likely to receive spam messages than those users who do not post on public web sites and public forums. As an administrator it is a good practice to remind corporate users of email policies intended to protect not only the end users from spam but also the company.

2. Discourage or block out web sites that are not related to work-related matters.

Internet web sites that are not related to normal working day to day activities can be blocked through the use of firewalls and protocol filters. Such sites might include adult web sites and other sites which promote the use of illegal products. But having filters set up to block those sites from being used by employees computers can help to decrease the time spent on such sites and at the same time increase employee productivity.

3. Require end users to modify their email signatures so as not to give out their email addresses with complete domain names.

Spammers use “bots” that are little chunks of code whose only purpose is to crawl around the internet web sites – specifically HTML web pages – in search of email addresses.

There are a lot of scripts out there – usually four to five lines of code – that can easily be downloaded and modified with the appropriate corporate email addresses such that your internal email addresses are only exposed when the web page is browsed. This prevents a “bot” from pulling email addresses directly off of your corporate web sites and protects any of your corporate customers from becoming the subject of spammers who crawl your web site.

Another ploy administrators can use to hide their corporate email addresses is to literally write out their email addresses as in asking interested parties to send email to “myname at companyname dot com”. Use this format instead of the “mailto:“ link normally used on HTML web pages.

And if you want some payback you can always employ the use of software which will create fake email addresses and URL links that go nowhere whenever spambots are discovered.

4. Discourage the use of email service providers – and hence public email addresses – that corporate users are allowed to use in the enterprise environment.

Public email service providers such as Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, et al. are targets for the spammers. Just limiting the number of public email accounts that an employee uses in the corporate world for communications can significantly reduce the number of spam mail messages they receive.

5. Don’t flame.

It is a better strategy to just walk and ignore the spammers. All you’re really doing when you send back negative email to spammers is engage them for future discussions. And it really is a waste of valuable time that should be used for work or other activities. A corporate email policy should also include an edict on not responding to spam.

6. Use spam blocking software.

   There is a lot of software available which can prevent and limit the number of spam emails that a company receives. Such anti-spamming software can be used to separate the spam email messages from the rest of the valid email that is normally received in day to day operations. Some packages include firewall like protection from specific domains known to send out spam.

Lastly, file complaints with the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx.