Some businesses report receiving up to 500 spam e-mails a day, according to one local company.
Jamestown firm devises innovative subscription service to combat all those unwanted e-mails
If deleting too-good-to-be-true mortgage offers and cut-rate prescription deals from your e-mail inbox is taking a bite out of your workday, a Jamestown-based company may have a way for you to deal with all that spam.
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The Mail Cruncher e-mail sorting service – developed by April Lorenzen, president of FullScaleCommerce.com – screens e-mail based on the identity, stability and security of the sender.
“It’s unique mainly because we base (spam) detection on age, identity or how long the domain has been around,” Lorenzen said.
Mail Cruncher uses a business trust rating database called the Outbound Index, which catalogues 230 million Internet authority records and updates every change to every dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domain in the world every day.
Lorenzen’s subscription service differs from traditional spam-blocker software in that it doesn’t scan the text of e-mails received. The Outbound Index is based on the idea that spammers tend to hide behind false user names and move domains often, whereas legitimate businesses stay in the same place and are easily identifiable.
For instance, a spammer in Romania can send an e-mail using a familiar user name to your account and appear perfectly legit. Mail Cruncher looks at the electronic footprint of the e-mail, sees that it comes from an unreliable e-mail server and flags it as spam.
“(The service) can tell if there’s a relationship between the outbound server and the domain,” Lorenzen said. The evidence of that relationship can be obtained by cross-checking existing Internet authority records.
Messages that have a high Outbound Index rating go to the subscriber’s mailbox, those with lower ratings are quarantined.
Near the end of each workday, the service sends clients a single e-mail with all the spam their account received through the day. Clients can look at a single list of user names, domains and e-mail subject lines to see if there are any legitimate e-mails they wish to keep.
Mail Cruncher can be a helpful alternative to a content filter for businesses like Realtors and doctors, since spam often includes the words “mortgage” or “prescription,” subject matter that often appears in their legitimate e-mails.
After reviewing the e-mail list, subscribers can delete the Mail Cruncher e-mail with a single click, or send messages that are legitimate to their inbox. The list is color-coded and prioritized – messages the subscriber had previously marked as wanted are first, messages from new senders are next in another color and the third set are messages from a server the subscriber has deleted previously.
Subscribers can “white list” e-mails that Mail Cruncher regularly flags as spam. By doing so, the service won’t hold back e-mails from those servers and instead allow them to pass right to their inbox.
The service can be a plus for businesses, Lorenzen said, for two reasons.
“You really have no risk of losing potentially revenue-generating e-mail,” whereas a content filter may block legitimate messages based on their content, Lorenzen said.
In addition, the amount of time employees spend checking spam e-mail all day can be eliminated by using Mail Cruncher, she added.
Lorenzen said the idea for Mail Cruncher was borne through running her Web, database and e-mail hosting company, FullScaleCommerce.com.
“The idea grew from the frustration we encountered dealing with spam,” she said. “We started developing (Mail Cruncher) a few years ago when spam became really annoying.”
Lorenzen said approximately 200 companies with 800 user mailboxes in the United States and abroad have signed up for Mail Cruncher. She estimates that the typical employee receives between 30 and 50 spam e-mails per day. The total number, though, varies by customer usage.
“Some of our customers who signed up for many offers online get as many as 500 spams per day,” Lorenzen said. “My objective was to give people a really easy way to deal with the fact that (anti-spam software) might hold back some mail they really want.”
Mail Cruncher is available for $3 per mailbox per month and offers a 60-day risk-free trial. For more information, visit www.MailCruncher.com.
