Spammers and Viruses and Worms, oh my!

This article was originally published as part of the Pobox blog. Pobox was acquired by Fastmail in 2015.

Email worms hit the news again recently with Inauguration and Valentine’s Day themed lures. Worms are a particular type of virus, designed to take control of your computer to send more spam. Because the virus sends more spam, they can spread very quickly, and generate a huge amount of email.

Pobox spam protection uses many, many blacklists to help protect you from spam, but for viruses and worm, we turn to Cloudmark. Cloudmark is terrific at catching all types of spam, but their virus identification is excellent, too. Because of the huge numbers of reports they get (both from automated sources and people like you), they identify viruses, phishing attempts and other types of malicious messages just as effectively as they pick up spam.

If you use Pobox webmail, messages marked as spam are automatically submitted to Cloudmark for addition to their spam filters. So, your feedback not only helps your future spam filtering, but the filtering of people worldwide!

Email Tip: For those of you who read your email on multiple devices, the Unclutterer had a great post this week on getting your email under control.