How Email Spam Can Endanger Your Business

Almost everyone uses email these days, especially at work. If you’re a business owner, you know how vital email is to your daily work. However, you probably also know just how much spam you get every day. You may open your inbox to find dozens of spam messages, and those are just the ones that managed to get past your spam filter. There could be hundreds more that never made it to your inbox. While this is certainly an annoyance, spam can be very dangerous for your business. That’s why you should never simply assume these junk messages are harmless.

They Clutter Your Email

While this is by far the most harmless thing spam does, it’s still an issue. Spam messages can fill up your inbox, making it difficult to pick out the good emails in the sea of junk. You might think you’re only deleting spam, but you may have accidentally clicked on a good email while highlighting messages to send to the trash.

Good Emails Get Sent to Spam

One side effect of setting up a strong spam filter is that it may occasionally catch good emails and put them in your spam folder. If you don’t wade through the dozens of spam messages that go to this folder every day, you could miss an important email from a client, supplier, or other contact. This can lead to missing out on orders, losing customers, and missing important meetings. While spam filters are becoming better and better at telling the difference between legitimate messages and spam, there’s still a chance something will slip through.

Spam Contains Malware

Many spam messages contain malware and other viruses designed to allow hackers access to your network. When you or an employee opens one of these messages and either clicks on the link or opens the attachment, your system can be instantly compromised. That’s why you need to have anti-spam software such as MailCleaner. This program is designed to catch spam, especially those that contain viruses, malware, and spyware. It prevents these programs and the messages containing them from even getting to your employees.

Employees Aren’t Always Trained

Many employees are simply told not to open attachments on suspicious emails, but that’s about the length of their training regarding spam emails. They’re not trained in how to determine if an email is phishing or if a link within an email is legitimate or not. This results in many employees clicking links that take them to phishing sites that may have viruses or other malware on them. In addition to installing spam filters, you need to make sure your employees are trained on how to use them and how to recognise emails that are spam.

Employees also need to be told what to do if they accidentally open an attachment or click a link to a site that may be fraudulent. They should know when to report these things and who to report them to. Likewise, your IT team should have a documented process for dealing with these situations.