For those of you who haven’t heard of Loggly, Loggly is cloud based service for complete application intelligence for app developers.  Loggly uses log data to collect, analyze, troubleshoot and monitor your applications. They are a heavy user of Amazon’s Web Service hosting, and recently experienced a truly stellar outage of massive proportions. You can read about that on a Loggly blog post here which I encourage you to do. However, I am not here to talk about lessons learned about hosting and availability, and putting eggs in consolidated baskets. Nor am I planning to talk about on premise versus hosted, and the perceived dangers of the cloud. It’s what happened to Loggly and how they went unaware of the impending freight train heading their way that I want to discuss, because there are some great lessons to learn from that little subset of their blog post. Continue reading Lessons Learned from the Loggly Outage

Spam is a serious problem for anyone who is tasked with managing an organization’s email services.

Annually, spam costs US businesses between $42 million and $50 million in lost productivity and other costs. And it’s not just large corporations that feel the sting when it comes to spam. It is estimated that a company with five employees will lose $16,180.40 and 8.125 work days of pro­duc­tiv­ity per year because of spam. A com­pany with 25 employees could stand to lose $80,902.00 and 40.62 work days per year due to having to deal with spam. Continue reading Is Your Website a Magnet for Email Spam?

Small and medium-sized businesses face many of the same threats that large companies do when it comes to their email systems. Some of the common problems that email administrators face are:

• Spam delivered via email
• Viruses and malware delivered via email
• Email messages that contain inappropriate content
• Information leaks. Continue reading 5 Tips for Better Email Security

Email marketing continues to be one of the most successful ways to spread the word about your company and what you have to offer. After all, if it wasn’t so successful then spammers would simply turn their efforts elsewhere.

But in the world of email marketing, there is a fine line between running a clean, effective campaign and coming across as a spammer.

As email administrators, it is up to us to make sure that emails get delivered. Unfortunately taking too aggressive of an approach when it comes to email marketing can make our jobs more difficult, and not only with making sure marketing emails arrive at their destination. When marketing efforts blemish the reputation of the organization’s domain, any emails being sent can be flagged as spam. Continue reading 3 Things You Need to Know About Email Marketing

Have you checked the spam flowing into your organization lately? Microsoft has, and it has reported its findings in its Security Intelligence Report for the first half of this year.

The report, which is based data collected from 600 million computers worldwide, noted that pharmacy spam remains a favorite of junk emailers. An analysis of telemetry data from Microsoft customers who process tens of billions of messages a month using the company’s Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) shows that 28 percent of all spam is non-sexual pharmacy junk. By comparison, sexual pharma spam is at the low end of the spectrum at 3.1 percent.

Behind pharma junk are non-pharmacy product ads (17.2 percent), 419 or “Nigerian” scams (13.2 percent), financial services (8.9 percent) and gambling (6.1 percent). Continue reading What Spam Is in Your Inbox? Microsoft Breaks it Down

When the U.S. CAN SPAM Act was passed eight years ago, critics of the measure doubted it would put a dent in the flow of Internet junk mail. They were right, but few would have predicted that many spammers would use the law as a subterfuge for their pesky activities. They do that with “snowshoe spam.”

It’s called that because it exploits the principal used by snowshoes to prevent their wearer from sinking into deep snow. They do that by distributing a walker’s weight over a larger area of snow. Snowshoe spam keeps junk e-mail from being sunk by a system’s spam defenses by spreading the spew across multiple IP addresses.

That can be particularly effective against an email system’s volume filters. Those filters monitor the origin of email. If a large volume of email with the same content is coming from an IP address, those filters will start blocking the email and treat it as spam. By using multiple IP addresses, spammers can keep the volumes on any single IP address low enough to submarine the thresholds used by the volume filters. Continue reading Junk Mail Law Contributes to Expansion of ‘Snowshoe Spam’

Not only is email the most common form of business communication, but it is also an important tool when it comes to compliance, record keeping and covering yourself.

So when a report comes out that claims that email delivery rates are 81% relying on electronic messaging for so many things can easily be called into question.

According to a study from Return Path, worldwide delivery rates for email communications hasn’t improved since 2009. The study also showed that 7 percent of all messages were classified as spam and 12 percent never reaching their destination.

For North American email users, the numbers are a bit better. An 86 percent deliverability rate is up 4 percent from the 2009 study and 6 percent are flagged as spam with 8 percent getting lost in the “mail”. Continue reading Has Your Email Lost Its Way?

Whether you are gathering research for marketing, trying to support a project or just making a point the use of statistics always helps build a stronger argument. The following list of statistics were put together regarding email and fall under a variety of subjects such as general email, email marketing and, of course, email security.

1. In 2009 there were 1.9 billion email users worldwide. That is projected to grow to 2.5 billion users by the year 2014.
2. In 2010 there were an estimated 2.9 billion email mailboxes. 730 million of them are business email inboxes.
3. There was an estimated 294 billion emails sent every day in 2010 totaling over 90 trillion emails sent every year, or 2.8 million emails sent every second.
4. The average number of emails sent by a typical business user each day is 43. That same user receives an average of 130 emails each day. Continue reading 35 Interesting Statistics About Email

The primary role of the email administrator is to make sure that emails sent from your company are successfully delivered, and emails sent to your coworkers are received. Of course there are quite a few other responsibilities that the average email admin has to address as well and one of them is to prevent spam from being delivered to the inboxes of your colleagues, but how often do you think about spam being sent from the accounts you are responsible for?

For email administrators that have a solid security team in their corner usually find that clients relaying spam is a rare occurrence. Yet what is an email administrator to do when a company’s email marketing efforts get their domain blacklisted?

Continue reading Email Marketing and the Email Administrator

When your e-mails are flagged by the spam filters as legitimate spam, it can be bad for your business as communication gets derailed, especially if you are expecting an important email.  To avoid losing an important client or work getting prolonged due to e-mails not being read, you need to ensure your messages always reach the intended mailboxes.

It seems that the spam filters sometimes automatically move messages tagged as “illegitimate messages” into the spam inbox section.  You can actually prevent this from happening by composing a good message that will pass the spam filters.  The spam filters generally work by employing a scoring system.  If an e-mail message gets a high score, the higher the chances of the message arriving at the spam folder and eventually being deleted without being read.  To get over the spam filters, you need to know some dos and don’ts so you can guarantee that your important messages will appear in the proper mailbox of the recipient.

Continue reading 10 Ways to Make Sure your Emails Never End Up in the Spam Folder