Email spam is a huge problem, with malicious and irrelevant messages clogging both personal and business inboxes more every year. Today, spam accounts for about 14.5 billion emails globally per day—about 45 percent of the messages sent in a single 24-hour period.
Did you know this flood of spam has the potential to negatively impact your business? Not only does managing an overloaded inbox take time and money; spam also exposes your business to the possibility of viruses, phishing and malware. And if your email filter isn’t precisely tuned, you might be missing important messages and not even realize it.
So how is spam affecting your business? You can quickly discover how easy it is for legitimate business emails to get flagged as spam—and therefore how susceptible your company may be—by running a free online spam checker. This type of tool will assign your email or IP address a score based on how it is ranked by common spam indicators or blacklists.
Here are three free email spam checker tools to assess your company against common spam filter methods:
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Email Spam Test: This quick, simple test will analyze an email’s content, including subject line, HTML source and links, to determine whether most spam filters would block it. Paste in one of your recent incoming emails to discover how easy it is for a simple message to be considered spam.
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Mail Poet: Designed to test the “spamminess” of newsletters, this website checks content for specific words, while also comparing your email address to common blacklists. If you subscribe to any trade e-newsletters, test Mail Poet out by pasting the text of a recent message into their spam checker. You might be surprised by how often company-related content is considered spam.
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Blacklist Check: This site enables you to compare IP addresses in your company to 100 common DNS-based email blacklists. If any of your company’s IP address have been blacklisted, messages sent from them will not be delivered to inboxes that are secured with most traditional email spam filters—and that might include your own company.
Now What?
If your email spam checker score wasn’t quite what you would hope, that means important emails sent by your employees—both internally and externally—could be incorrectly flagged as spam. Most spam filters work by analyzing the content of each email, looking for common signs of spam, such as many numbers, unusual formatting, certain words and phrases, and other markers. However, in a business environment, all of these traits can be fairly common in both emails that your employees send to each other and important messages that they want to receive. So your company’s spam filter could easily be routing legitimate messages to the spam folder, which is called a “false positive.”
False positives aren’t only inconvenient–they can also be costly. At many companies, employees must manually search through their spam folders for any important messages that were mislabeled as spam, wasting precious time that could be used on other tasks. And if they miss an important message altogether, there could be a significant financial or operational impact to the business.
To avoid costly false positives, look for an email security solution that detects spam based on the sender, rather than the content. That way, you can rest assured that you and your employees will never again lose an important email to the spam folder.
Sendio developed its Opt-Inbox™ verification process for exactly this reason. The proprietary challenge-response process allows your business to filter emails based on the sender, rather than the content, so you only receive the email you want.
Sendio helps you take back your inbox from all today’s deluge of spam. Ready to learn more? Click here to contact us or schedule a free demo.