How to minimize SPAM in your CBPref.com Inbox

Transcription

1 How to minimize SPAM in your CBPref.com Inbox By Jason K. Serafin As I travel through our Coldwell Banker Preferred branch offices, I hear many agents ask me the same question over and over: What can we do to eliminate spam? Our sales associates claim to receive so many spam or junk s to their cbpref.com business address daily. Other agents say the same occurs with their personal accounts such as Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, etc. The answer is, ultimately, there's no way for you, me, or anyone to completely eliminate spam. The real questions are: How do you deal with spam, when you get it so that it's merely a minor annoyance rather than an overwhelming chore, and how do you avoid spam, or at least minimize it, in the first place? You Can't Stop Spam The bottom line is that anyone can send you , period. That's good in that anyone who knows you and your address can communicate with you via . It's also bad, since anyone who knows your address can send you junk trying to sell you stuff or fool you into handing over your private information when you shouldn't. Eventually all addresses will receive spam. Blocking Doesn't Always Work On the surface blocking or banning seems like the perfect solution. But if you look deeper, spammers can work around that option almost instantly. Blocking simply tells your provider or program "whenever you get from this address, discard it immediately". So why doesn't that work? Because spammers change their address too often. In most cases, most spammers never send from the same address more than once. This makes it difficult to block individual addresses. But even worse, spammers fake the address. They can make a spam message look like it comes from one of your friends or acquaintances. If you ban or block one of those, then that friend or acquaintance can no longer send you . For this and other reasons, blocking usually isn t a viable approach any more.

2 Spam Filters Make Life Bearable What does work are good spam filters. Spam filters work by looking not just at where comes from, but the nitty-gritty technical details of the ; what it's about, what it says and how it says, and how many other people are getting that same message. If it looks like spam, then the is simply placed in your spam or junk mail folder instead of your inbox. On average, users receive 100 spam s or more per day. But less than 10, maybe even less than 5, actually show up in your cbpref.com business inbox thanks to Barracuda SPAM filtering for Coldwell Banker Preferred agents. If you have 100+ spam s arriving in your inbox every day, I would guess you're not protected by a spam filter at all. How to access Barracuda The Quarantine Site for CBPref.com SPAM Everyone who has a cbpref.com address automatically has their own SPAM filtering system called Barracuda. 1. To access your Barracuda SPAM folder, go to a. Your user name = your cbpref.com address b. Your password is the same as your current cbpref.com password and wireless password 2. If you have issues logging in, please feel free to call the NRT helpdesk at NRT-HELP

3 After you login, you should see a screen similar to below that shows your Quarantine Inbox folder and all mail that has been sent to your account but has been quarantined by the system (not delivered to your Mailbox).

4 Within this screen you can release quarantine messages that have been marked as spam and add addresses to the Whitelist for your account. The first section is the search area, if you do not see the

5 you were looking to release to your mailbox, you can search for the specific message using one of the 3 search criteria: ( From contains, Subject contains and Message contains). For example: If you are looking for a hotmail.com address, choose From contains from the drop down Filter menu and type in hotmail.com in the Pattern field. Please remember to click on the Apply Filter button to view your search criteria. You can add a check mark in the box to the left of the message and clicked deliver to send the message to your Inbox.

6 PLEASE NOTE: You can also click the Whitelist button if you want to avoid the from being quarantined the next time. If you click the Preferences Tab you can Whitelist all your approved address and Blacklist all spam addresses as needed.

7 Similarly, if you're using an program such as Outlook, Windows Mail or dozens of others, take the time to learn and understand its spam filtering features. Some programs have next to no filtering, but many have the same type of "learning" spam filter that the web sites do, albeit on a smaller scale. Challenge/Response I have to start out by saying that I really dislike challenge/response spam blockers. These are systems where the first time you send someone a message you get an automated response that includes some hoop you need to jump through to prove you're human and not a spammer. Typically it involves filling out a CAPTCHA (distorted letters test) or something similar.

8 Essentially you're placing the burden of blocking spam on all the people sending you . At the same time you're also very likely to begin missing mail you actually want, such as automated confirmation of your online purchases or your bank statements. Almost all automated systems will not fill out the CAPTCHA requirements and therefore, you will not receive legitimate . Like I said, I really don't like this approach. However, I will include it here as a last resort for the truly overwhelmed agents as a last resort. One of the most common and reputable services would be Spam Arrest.

9 Preventing or minimizing Spam in the First Place There is no way to really stop spam, only deal with it in a way that makes it less of an issue when you get it. Similarly there's no way to prevent it from starting. Eventually all address will get spam. Eventually! What you can do is avoid asking for spam. Many people unknowingly ask for spam in various ways: Giving your address to the wrong person, company or agency. This is actually one reason many people have more than one address, or create one-time or "throw-away" addresses. Many companies will share their lists with others, or even sell the list of their customer's addresses. Reputable companies do not, so keep shopping at Amazon and the like, but be careful when dealing with a company you've never dealt with before. Consider creating and using a different address for this purpose. Responding to or acting on spam. Replying to any form of spam is really just a signal to the spammers that they have a real, live person at this address, and that they should send you more spam. Lots more spam. Even if you ask them to unsubscribe you. Similarly, acting on spam (such as clicking on spammer's link, or - horrors! - purchasing a product through spam) also tells spammers "we got a live one! Enabling pictures on spam. The reason that pictures are disabled by default on most spam-filtered is that the mere act of accessing an image so that it can be displayed can tell a spammer they have a real address. Expect more spam. Posting an address publicly. If your address is visible on a web page somewhere that anyone can get to, then "anyone" includes spammers. They have been known to harvest addresses from web pages on the assumption that they are more likely to be real, active addresses than simply guessing randomly (which they also do). The list actually goes on. What's worse is it includes items that are not in your control: When you send a joke, photo, urban legend, rant or what-have-you to a friend, and they then forward it on without removing your address from the forward, your address is now "in the wild". Worse, when a friend sends you an like that and does so by putting you and 200 other people on the "To:" or "Cc:" line, they've just advertised your address to everyone else that got that . And when they forward it without trimming... your address makes it out to potentially hundreds or thousands of people you don't know. And some of those people are spammers. There's literally nothing you can do, except perhaps admonish your friends not to do that - but by then it's too late. That's why I say that sooner or later every address will get spam.