Author Archives: Oleksandr

2016 Highlights

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When the Festive season is over and 2017 is ready to start working on all the New Year Resolutions and plans, we would like to stop for a moment to sum up what Spamdrain has achieved in 2016.

As most of the companies, we had our business plan for the year and had already summarised it for ourselves. However, all the plans and their realisations would not have been possible without YOU, our customers, so now we are more than glad to share our main achievements with YOU:

  • In 2016 we have processed more than 3500 customers’ support requests which means that Spamdrain Team has solved lots of issues in different areas and we are happy to know that our Team is strong enough to deal with any matter that may appear. We have also updated our Help Desk Articles and created new ones based on your requests.
  • We have expanded our team in order to provide excellent service. Each Spamdrain’s team member knows that his or her work is one more step to better quality of the product.
  • In 2016 we have received much more positive feedbacks than in any other previous year. Reading them, we understand that we are on the right way to happy customer. You might want to check some recent feedbacks on our main page of the website (feedbacks are updating).
  • 2016 has brought some negative feedbacks as well but we are thankful for that as well. Having carefully studied each of them helped us to understand that there are no limits in getting better and we will continue working on our perfection.
  • Based on the feedbacks and reviews from our customers, we have provided different discounts for new and current users. The most recent discount was dedicated to Black Friday. We hope that you enjoyed them and surely, we will enrol some new discounts soon.
  • We have rolled out a lot of new features. Actually, our users suggested many of them and we really appreciate this contribution to Spamdrain. You can check newly added features in our previous posts here.
  • We have trained all our Spamsters to work as a team and always stay on guard of our customers’ Inboxes.

All in all, we would like to thank YOU for helping us in reaching our last year goals and we hope that this year will bring us new ideas and new achievements. There are lots of things we have planned and a lot of work to be done.

All we want is a world of clean Inboxes 🙂

Secure Yourself from Phishing Emails

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what-is-a-phishing-scam-136394107163503901-141103122830

In this article we would like to highlight some key points regarding email security and phishing scams.

First of all, what is phishing? Email messages that are trying to get your personal information are called phishing scams. Usually this kind of messages lead you to the fraudulent websites using links included in the message. The website itself is intended to collect your username, email address, password, credit card detail etc.

According to Symantec threat report, the reported number of exposed identities jumped to 429 million in 2015. Since phishing is considered to be one the most devious form of identity theft, it is important for your to become familiar with the various types of phishing scams as well as to learn how to be protected from them. We gathered the most useful and powerful tips on how to beat phishing messages:

1. Do not click on the links, download files and attachments from unknown and suspicious senders. If you think the link is strange and doubtful, probably it is so. Never go to your bank’s website by clicking on links included in emails.
2. Do not reply to suspicious messages with providing your personal data (passwords, credit card details, etc.) to the sender. You never know who is behind the “sender” field. When you really need to share your information it is better to use secure website or just call the person than using an email to provide passwords.
3. Change your accounts’ passwords and check you bank account status regularly. Some companies have a policy rule to change account’s password regularly and use only hard to guess ones. Why don’t get such a rule for yourself?
4. One of the best options (that you are probably already using) is Spamdrain filter. Every week Spamster stops like 4-5 million spam messages with viruses, blank senders, etc. (and that’s even without newsletters). Our spam filters analyze every little detail from the sender field to the links in the message and our Spamster works hard to keep our customers satisfied. He is always on guard of your email address from phishing emails.

Well, it’s time to go and keep your Inbox free from phishing emails.
Thanks for reading!

We’ve rolled out an amazing new feature!

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Now you can find your messages in the blocked and allowed lists faster! Just go to one of the lists here and click on the filter email list icon at the top-right corner as shown on the screenshot:
newfeature
You will see a checkbox with the date in the pop-up window. Just enter the date and click on Filter. Find the needed message from that date in one click. There is no need to scroll down the page finding the email through tons of other messages. In order to reset the date filter just uncheck the checkbox and click on Filter.
Currently this feature is available only in our web version. Follow our blog and you will be the first to know when it goes live on our mobile apps.

How to: Unsubscribe from Newsletters

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Newsletters and other promotional emails cannot be called “spam” technically, as they are from legitimate organizations but sometimes they get annoying. In this article, we will try to help you get rid of such unwanted messages.
The very first tip is to think twice before giving your email address to online forums and guest books and of course any suspicious websites. If you already do so, you can close this article and enjoy your free-from-spam Inbox.
However, it is very easy to get into some distributional newsletter list even if you did not intend to. It’s a common practise to provide unsubscribe link in every legitimate newsletter. Usually, desirable link is hidden at the bottom of the email message. You might want to try the following steps to free your inbox from unwanted newsletter once and forever:

 
1. Open a newsletter message;
2. Find the Unsubscribe link and click on it. Sometimes it can be hard to find the needed link because newsletter senders do not want to lose their audience. You can resolve this little issue using a search option in the webmail client (to speed things up you can press Ctrl+F) and type “Unsubscribe” in the search field. Here it is! Usually, clicking on the link redirects you to the source website and asks to confirm your decision;
NOTE: If you use some email application, the combination of the “Search” hot keys might be different, e.g. Outlook will respond to Ctrl+E to run the search.
3. Finally, you see something like: We have removed your email address from our list. What a relief! This might be not the end of the story though. Sometimes, it is required to go through several steps before you finally see that you are unsubscribed.

Keep in mind, the guide applies to legitimate email newsletters (like Linkedin, Twitter etc.). Spam newsletters are not so easy to deal with. It’s typical for spam newsletters to lead your email address to more spam lists (and this is definitely not the unsubscribe process). This is where Spamdrain comes in handy. Newsletter filter is enabled at your Spamdrain account by default. Now, using Spamdrain newsletter filter, spam newsletters are not a problem anymore.

You can find more information here.

Hopefully, now you will be much more confident in security of your email address in terms of spam newsletters.

Feel free to leave likes and comments! We will be more than glad to hear your ideas for our next HOW TO articles.

Email Address Construction

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Today Spamster is offering you some interesting facts about email address and a few funny names for @ sign.
An email address consists of three parts:
at_sign-svg
1) Local Part
Local part consists of up to 64 characters and is chosen by the email account owner or administrator.

2) Domain part
Could be custom domain, company, organization providing the email service, ISP provider. The domain name part of an email address has to conform to strict guidelines: it must match the requirements for a hostname, a list of dot-separated DNS labels, each label being limited to a length of 63 characters.

3) “At” sign
Officially, this symbol is called commercial at. Unofficially, most people seem to refer to it as the at sign or just at. Recently, there has also been a movement to call it the “atmark”. There are also numerous nicknames for it, including snail, curl, strudel, whorl, and whirlpool.

Here are some quirky names for the @ symbol in different countries:
apenstaartje – Dutch for “monkey’s tail”
snabel – Danish for “elephant’s trunk”
kissanhnta – Finnish for “cat’s tail”
klammeraffe – German for “hanging monkey”
papaki – Greek for “little duck”
kukac – Hungarian for “worm”
dalphaengi – Korean for “snail”
grisehale – Norwegian for “pig’s tail”
sobachka – Ukrainian for “little dog”

We believe that there are more funny names for @ sign than gathered above. Tell us how @ sign is called in your country or probably your own nickname for it.
Looking forward to your comments.

5 things you did not know about Spamdrain: 2

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Our Spamster continues to explore our customers’ needs and has some newly added features to share. Well, some of them are not brand new but definitely useful.
1. Spamdrain has rolled out an amazing new feature for our customer: fetch interval change. First, what is fetch interval? Fetch interval is the frequency of connections to your email server from Spamdrain servers. Sometimes you can see an error at the filtering: Error Connect. In most cases the reason of the issue is that our servers’ IP addresses are blocked due to too frequent connections. Now you can set fetch interval according to your email provider’s policy. Just click on the needed email address  here and click on Advance on the pop up window in order to change the interval.
2. Viewing tutorial is a good option to meet our Spamster and get to know him from the start. Many people ignore tutorial just closing it without any chance for our Spamster to introduce himself. From now on, you can restart tutorial and review what was skipped. The option is available here under the “Your settings” area.
3. Probably, you are already using a daily reports option to check the emails that were blocked. However, did you know that such reports could be weekly and monthly? That’s not even all – biweekly is also an option. You can set it here . Just click on EDIT under “Your settings area”.
4. Sometimes we receive requests to restore deleted messages. Proudly we can say: “We can restore messages”. But, there is always a “but”. If the messages are removed by empty list option we can restore the last empty list action. If the messages were deleted one by one or just one message was deleted, unfortunately, we would not be able to restore them.
5. Spamster is very thankful to our customers for all the feedbacks. They really help us to improve the service and work hard further. Oops, looks like Spamster ran away to show up in the tutorial as there is already a customer who restarted our tutorial!
He will surely be back soon!
Likes and shares are welcome as always!

5 Amazing Facts About Email

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Check out these amazing facts about email. Probably, you have not heard about all of them
1. First email message celebrates its 45th anniversary this month. In October 1971 first email message was sent between two computers placed next to each other. Thank you Ray Tomlinson for the first email program on the ARPANET system!

2. Do you know where the word “spam” came from? It is named for canned meat product that was introduced in 1937. The word spam became popular in 1970 because of BBC comedy sketch Monty Python. The name of meat product was mentioned 108 times in that sketch. You can check it here

3. Do you have one of the most common passwords? We hope you don’t, but to make sure just have a look at the top 10 most used passwords:

123456
password
1234578
qwerty
12345
123456789
football
1234
1234567
baseball
welcome
4. According to a Radicati Group study from February 2015, there are about 2.5 billion email users in the world. In May 2009, Radicati Group made a research that there are about 1.9 billion email users worldwide. As for 2019, they project nearly 2.9 billion email users all over the world.

5. Just a few numbers that show how common the spam problem is:
Average office worker receives 121 emails a day:
– Percentage of email that is spam: 49.7%
– Percentage of emails that have a malicious attachment: 2.3%

We hope you enjoyed the article. As always, feel free to comment and share with friends
Yours,
Spamdrain Team

5 things you did not know about Spamdrain

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Do you know that there are a few hidden tips at Spamdrain? Well, actually, they are not hidden, but just easy to miss. Here are some hints that can make your friendship with our Spamster even stronger. Check out below:

1. There are two lists where you can put email addresses: Whitelist and Blacklist. As you can guess from the names, there is a possibility to add unwanted email addresses to the blacklist and forbid some annoying spammers to get into your inbox. With the whitelist you can let your favorite email addresses get into your Inbox without any obstacles.

2. Sharing our services is cool! Yes, of course, you have seen that you can provide a friend with a link from here and get free months. But did you know that four recommendations to the friends with one email address will give you one year of free filtering of one email address? Don’t miss this opportunity and check it right now!

3. Our Spamster is so cool that once people saw him on the main page, they do not scroll down to explore for more. At the bottom of the main page you can see that we have pages at social media networks:
you-should-follow-us

4. Email lists filter. There is a possibility to filter messages depending on their type in the allowed and blocked lists:

1-allowed-filtered-list 1-blocked-filtered-list

5. Do you know what’s making our Spamster happy? Each added email address! It is a little step to the world full of clean Inboxes!

5 tips on how to write an email effectively

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Here are the most common tips that our spamster has gathered for his users:

1) Specify the subject field
Always clarify the subject with the words related to the message. Try to put the subject line that will describe the content of the entire letter. Never leave the subject line empty. Using the words like: attention, important, discount etc., could lead your message to the spam folder and there is a chance your message will never reach its recipients.

2) Sign your letters
Signature in a courteous manner shows your attitude to the recipient. Do not forget to add to your signature words like sincerely, regards or just BR. As an option, create a signature in your email client and it will be added at the end of the letter automatically.

3) Respond promptly
I guess, everyone had a situation waiting for an email reply for too long. Therefore, there is no need to make other people waiting. Even replying with something like: “Unfortunately busy at the moment, will reply tomorrow” will let the sender know that you are aware of the message.

4) CC or BCC ?
If you’d like to share your message with other recepients, besides the primary addressee, you can use CC or BCC fields. The abbreviation CC indicates those who are to receive a copy of an e-mail addressed to another person. The list of receipients in CC is shown for all other recepients of the message. BCC field, on the contrary, is available for hidden notification, not visible to any other receivers (including those in BCC). Indicating that you are adding a new participant to the list of recievers is considered a good practice.

 
5) Email address can be hacked
Do not send your passwords, confidential information, personal information etc. via email. Remember to update your email password regularly and with the secure, hard to guess password.

I hope those tips will be useful before clicking on send 🙂
Sincerely yours,
Spamdrain’s spamster

POP3 and IMAP: basics and differences

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Spamdrain filtering supports two type of connections: IMAP and POP3.

POP3 is an internet protocol to retrieve email. Email messages are delivered and stored on your personal computer, mobile device or any other tablet or phone. When you check e-mail, read it, it is downloaded it to your computer and immediately deleted from the server. This means that read e-mail on the computer will not be accessible on the phone.
IMAP on the other hand saves and stores all your e-mail messages on the server. The advantage of IMAP access is that you can check and send e-mails on multiple devices because you always interact with a mail server and not just one device. IMAP protocol is better and more modern than POP3 protocol. Using IMAP connection allows you to store emails on the server and always have access to them (with the internet connection of course ). There is also an advantage of POP3 connection: you can read e-mails even when you are offline.

Each of these protocols provides secure and non-encrypted ports:

Port 995 – this is the default port to use in order to connect using POP3 securely     Port 110 – this is the default POP3 non-encrypted port

Port 993 – this is the default port to use in order to connect using IMAP securely     Port 143 – this is the default IMAP non-encrypted port

Those settings at Spamdrain could be changed here:

https://spamdrain.com/en/app.html#/settings

Our Inbox is clean from Spam, hope yours is too 🙂