RackFirm Hosting Solutions launches better SPAM prevention

RackFirm's recent study has shown that the amount of spam over the years has grown more than you might think. Although there is no internationally agreed-upon definition of "spam," many countries consider it to be any bulk commercial email sent without the express consent of recipients.

"SPAM" or "Junk Mail" email is the practice of sending massive amounts of e-mail promotions or advertisements (and scams) to people that have not asked for it. Spam mail is controversial and there are many levels of definitions for it. Many times, spam e-mail lists are created by "harvesting" e-mail addresses from discussion boards and groups, chat rooms, IRC, and web pages.

RackFirm has installed a new spam prevention software and now our e-mail servers prevented 1.6 million SPAM messages and over 550,000 e-mail viruses from reaching the inboxes of our customers. This is an amazing increase in blocked spam messages.

In 2005, 80% of total e-mail that AOL blocks at the gateway is spam. This represents an average of 1.5 billion spam messages each day from reaching the email boxes of the AOL Network. The total number of spam e-mails blocked reached over a half trillion (556 billion) in 2005 (America Online, 2005).

For others who are trying to combat spam in your inbox here are a few tips:

Don't paste your email in forums, websites, IRC channels. Posting your email address anywhere on the Internet will attract spam. Share your email addresses only with people you know and trust. Spammers collect email addresses using programs such as spiders, crawlers and bots that search the Internet for email addresses to add to their lists.

Reserve one email address for your trusted personal and business contacts. Create a separate, expendable email address for other online uses.
Don't try, don't buy and don't reply to spam. Just delete it. It's a great way to prevent receiving more spam in the future.

Spammers can reel in your valuable personal information through a practice known as "phishing." This occurs when an email shows up appearing to come from a reliable source with whom you do business, like a bank or online business. Often the message suggests that there is an urgent need for you to provide personal information, such as your login name, passwords or even credit card numbers, often combined with the faked threat that your account will be blocked if you do not comply. In these cases, the website link provided is to a copycat, but counterfeited site. Be aware that companies will NEVER contact customers in this manner. If you have doubts, don't trust the information supplied in the email, call the company to confirm if the request is legitimate. Also, never reply to these messages or connect through the link provided in a spam that you suspect is "phishing." If you are interested in a website, access it directly through a web browser.

RackFirm is a highly successful web hosting firm. Since its foundation in 2006, RackFirm has always had the goal of underscoring support, availability, technology and value.

In 2006, RackFirm was founded with the intent to provide dedicated servers that would revolutionize the industry.

RackFirm continues to provide high quality hosting services. Our staff members are always ready to help you and make your experience with us a pleasant one. We have a team of professionals at the Network Operations Center monitoring our servers - making sure they are online 24/7. Whether you have a family site, or a busy e-commerce site, we are dedicated to bring you the best customer support possible.

RackFirm offers hosting with amazing uptime and overall reliability. We pride ourselves on the fact that our servers are some of the most reliable in the business. We have direct links to multiple ISPs throughout the USA and the rest of the world, ensuring you receive the fastest speeds possible. We ensure that we can survive ISP outages, as we use multiple ISPs - if one goes down, the other will step in and handle your important traffic, to make sure it gets to its destination intact and on-time.