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The best anti spam solutions for small business

Many small businesses chose to simply deal with spam. The driving factor is that anti spam solutions are seen as complicated and costly. But that's no longer the case. Today, affordable solutions are available that work well, and are very nearly plug and play. The emerging leader is Barracuda networks. This appliance device not only filters SPAM it stops it from ever getting to your e-mail server.

The cost of SPAM to your business is two fold. The first and highest cost is of course the amount of time employees are forced to sift through junk e-mails trying to determine whether or not they are SPAM. But the hidden cost is all of the space on your server these files can take up. This is another one of the downfalls of plug in software applications that run on your server and detect and filter spam. These programs add overhead to the server processing as well as keeping the spam emails and taking up disk space.

An appliance anti-spam device, like the one from Barracuda, or Symantec, will not only filter spam on the fly, it also is configured to update itself with the latest spam filters drastically lowering the administrative ownership cost. The Barracuda networks unit starts at just $1999 for small business. A link to the product can be found above and you can purchase directly from the manufacturer.

If you don't have your own e-mail server, and your getting SPAM through your network provider there are limits to what you can. One thing you should never do is reply to a spam e-mail requesting they remove your e-mail address from their list. This is a common ploy used by spammers to try and validate the address. Once you reply, you'll actually more often than not see an increase in SPAM. Most larger internet service providers offer some sort of anti spam filtering software for free. If you are being inundated with messages it might be a good idea to check your configuration and make sure it's turned on. If it is, see if you can tweak the configuration and turn it up a bit.

One warning. Be careful with any system how high up you turn the filter. Some SPAM is going to get through. You just need to make sure that legitimate e-mails are still passing through the system.