Tag: email spam

  • What is a reply all “email storm” and how can you prevent it?

    What is a reply all “email storm” and how can you prevent it?

    In 2016 the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) experienced an email storm that crashed their email system and resulted in snowball effect of 168 million emails being sent in a short period of time.

    The cause? A new IT contractor for the company sent out a test email company-wide (the NHS employs 1.2 million people and 840 thousand of them received the test email). Many of them replied to it, wondering why they were receiving such an email using the “reply all” function and it snowballed from there into an email chain of epic proportions, an email storm.

    This email storm crashed their system and angered their employees. What they may not have known is that email storms have been occurring practically since email became the de facto method of communication for businesses around the world. The first one reported by major news and nicknamed “Bedlam” experienced by Microsoft occurred in 1997 resulted in 23 million emails sent in 7 hours, much less than the one experienced by the NHS but the amount of data generated by that storm (an estimated 295 gigabytes) was significant for the time period and the event was highly disruptive.

    Email storms have even hit US government entities like the state department and NASA, the latter of which practically led to the re-institution of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after it’s funding was cut by DOGE.

    So, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with you and your business? Well hopefully we’ve made it clear that email storms can happen to anyone, really at any time, and that they’re highly disruptive. The data generated by large email storms is not significantly different than the data generated by DDoS (Dedicated Denial of Service) attacks although it’s almost always an unintentional consequence of an employee or contractor sending a simple email company wide. What can you do as a business owner to prevent this from happening?

    1. Limit “Reply All” Permissions
    • What to do: Use email settings to restrict who can use the “Reply All” function, especially in large distribution lists.
    • Why it helps: Prevents unnecessary mass replies that trigger storms, especially when someone replies to hundreds or thousands of recipients.
    1. Use BCC for Large Email Lists
    • What to do: Add recipients to the BCC (blind carbon copy) field instead of the “To” or “CC” fields.
    • Why it helps: If people can’t see who else received the email, they can’t reply to everyone, avoiding the risk of a chain reaction.
    1. Implement Group Email Safeguards
    • What to do: Configure email servers (like Microsoft Exchange or Google Workspace) to throttle or block emails sent to large groups when too many replies occur in a short time.
    • Why it helps: Automated tools can detect a storm and shut it down before it escalates.

    While these common sense strategies can be enacted by anyone, managing email is a tricky topic overall. From setup to protections against spam or phishing, having a technology provider like Valley Techlogic can help you strategically create email policies that work and keep your business safe. Learn more today through a consultation.

    Looking for more to read? We suggest these other articles from our site.

    This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, leading provider of trouble free IT services for businesses in California including Merced, Fresno, Stockton & More. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on X at https://x.com/valleytechlogic and LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/valley-techlogic-inc/.

  • 5 Tips for Conquering Email Spam (and Phishing) in 2022

    We’ve posted on how to spot a phishing email before on this website, but what about just thwarting the attempt before it even reaches your inbox?

    Email filtering is a complex topic, too strict and you miss important emails. Too lax, your inbox is flooded with spam and attempts to scam you. At Valley Techlogic, we feel like we have a good regimen for helping our clients get the emails they need and not the ones they don’t.

    On top of that, email phishing is STILL the biggest security threat to your business. In 2021, 83% of businesses experienced phishing attack attempts and 15 billion spam emails occur every day.

    That’s a lot of attempts to circumvent the security features you have in place within your business, or if you don’t have protections in place (especially highly effective ones like multi-factor authentication) then your business may be a sitting duck. All it takes is one employee clicking on the wrong attachment and you have a major security headache on your hands.

    So, to foil those attempts, here are 5 tips for conquering email spam and preventing phishing attempts at the same time:

    1. Mark spam as spam. One of the easiest ways to see less spam in your inbox is to mark spam as spam, email filters learn from you what you’re looking to see in your inbox. While the most egregious spam will still be filtered out by your email provider for the most part, for sophisticated spam attempts your assistance helps. This also blocks the sender from sending future attempts.
    2. Learn the telltale signs. There 5 easy telltale signs an email is spam or phishing. They are: an unrecognizable sender, requesting personal information, an email that doesn’t match the purported sender, it asks you to take immediate action and/or there are a lot of typos.
    3. Enable more advanced privacy settings. Many email providers have privacy and security settings to provide more advanced protection. See our guide below for enabling these settings for Gmail and Outlook.
    4. For businesses, don’t go with the obvious choice for email. Many of us use just our first name or our first name and a last initial when creating our work emails, while this helps make our emails more memorable and easier to recite, it also opens us up to spam. If you have a spam problem, it might be best to switch things up in this area.
    5. Unsubscribe from mailing lists, especially the ones you didn’t sign up for. Another good way to combat spam in particular is to unsubscribe from mailing lists, there are rules and regulations that say vendors must respect this request or they’re potentially violating their emailing providers terms and conditions.
      Email Security Guide for Gmail and Outlook
      Click to view the full size version.

      Another way to combat spam and phishing emails is through a tool. There are tools that can be built into your browser or email client, many of them use the SLAM method. With this method they check the sender, the links, the attachments, and the message itself to look for telltale signs it’s a spam or phishing email.

    At Valley Techlogic we provide security awareness training – which is another excellent tool for preventing cyberattacks – and an extension for Outlook that includes the training and spam/phishing testing tool right in your inbox to all of our clients.

    We can also offer simulated phishing attempts so you will know if anyone in your organization could use additional training on the topic. Schedule a consultation today to learn more about how we can help you with your business’s email related goals.

    Looking for more to read? We suggest these other articles from our site.

    This article was powered by Valley Techlogic, an IT service provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/valleytechlogic.