“My Inbox has exploded!”

It’s November. Fall is in the air, and so is seasonal marketing. If you think your email Inbox is suddenly a lot busier, it most certainly is not your imagination.

The holiday selling season kicks off just after Halloween and won’t really peak until it’s too late for express delivery to get that package under the tree in time for Christmas. As a general frame of reference, January email volume typically falls over 30% off of December’s campaigns.

That’s great if you’re seeking great sales, free shipping, and early peeks at Black Friday and Cyber Monday goodies.

The festive season, however, comes with side effects. High in that list is the corresponding increase in unwanted email making it into the inbox – Spam.

Spam also rises as the holidays approach. Why? This is truly the million dollar question – actually millions of dollars in potential sales for the spammers’ goods and services. Taking advantage of the surge in email of all kinds, the folks sending unwanted email find it easier to fly under the radar and hit inboxes when traffic across the board is a lot higher. In a nutshell, it’s easier for spam to hide when there’s more email flowing overall. It becomes a smaller percentage of total volume, making it less visible to detection algorithms.

The impact hits both personal email accounts used for eCommerce along with business accounts. If your address has been out and about long enough, you’ll be on a list somewhere both in a business and consumer capacity. A quick online search for “B2B and B2C email lists” returns hundreds of thousands of results.

The numbers back this up. Symantec’s October Intelligence Report is telling: Spam has reached a six month high of 53.5%. Join this with their corollary finding that Crypto-ransomware was up once again during October, setting its own high for 2015.

That’s right. Hiding in all the spam vying for a piece of holiday spending are the nasty buggies–malware intent on doing damage.

What to do? Keep your basic email rules in mind, even when offers sound great!

• Don’t open email from senders you do not know, and remain skeptical if an email from someone you do know looks odd or uncharacteristic of their messages. Do not click on links or attachments if you are at all uncertain without confirming the source!
• Don’t click unsubscribe links if you haven’t requested email in the first place. That just confirms a valid address exists.
• If you’re seeing repeat spam, report it as spam to your ISP. As an ISP ourselves, we work with our customers to adjust spam settings and filters to the best of our ability to keep it contained.
• Keep your anti-virus and anti-malware detection software current, along with keeping current backups of your data just in case something makes it through! If you are hit by the type of ransomware mentioned above, encrypting and locking all of the data files it can reach, you’ll have to wipe the infected machine(s) and start again from a clean backup.

As always, if you have questions about email or want to talk to us about system security and backups, that’s why we’re here! Give us a call at 937.226.6896 or submit a request online!