We get that question every day. SPAM! We all hate it!

SPAM! Yuck! At Dovetail we've continually invested in helping to keep Spam to a minimum for our hosting customers. In fact some 80% + of all email that is sent through Dovetail is actually never seen. Yet we all still get spam.

And it seems to come in waves. Quiet. Quiet. And then BOOM! a bunch of new emails for what ever the greatest new stock or prescription might be.

Why does this cycle keep repeating itself. Well, quite frankly because spammers are smart! They keep coming up with new ways to get past the blockers.

The latest cycle has seen the use of PDF attachments that contain the spam message. Often they contain your email name in the title to help them even seem more valid.

This approach has proven to be extremely effective for spammers, and just as frustrating for those who try to combat them. PDF's are the standard file format used by business to exchange documents. We could simply block all emails with PDF's attached, but that's not going to work now is it. Miss getting one important document and your business suffers, so we put up with it.

But we are doing something, constantly. We monitor all email patterns regularly and "teach" our anti-spam systems to help do a better job determining what is spam and what isn't. We work with our vendors to communicate what our (and our customer) frustrations are with spam and, of course, we update our spam signatures every few hours.

While I know that spam will continue to be a problem as long as email is used, I hope that understanding how we approach it and how the industry keeps evolving may help illuminate just how much effort goes into really trying to keep it to a minimum. Just remember, on average every user who has an email address hosted at Dovetail would receive about 400% more mail daily and all of it would be spam.

-- Mike