In today's world all businesses rely heavily on IT and email, especially if they are involved in on-line lead-generation or sales, whether wholesale or retail. For smaller businesses it is especially important that emails are managed efficiently, in order to maximise the effectiveness of a small staff team.

It is vital that genuine leads, enquiries and customers can be identified and picked up from the email inbox quickly. Delay could result in the loss of vital sales and future orders.

Despite this, everyone using email, whether as a business or a private individual, is having to deal with ever-increasing amounts of unsolicited, unwanted, and downright annoying emails – the spam we all know and hate.

Some people receive huge amounts of spam emails, especially if they are not using any kind of spam blocker, and it can cause all sorts of problems. Inboxes overflow, meaning important genuine communications may not get through. In addition, staff time has to be given to weeding out and deleting the junk email – time that is lost to the business' productivity. Also, spam emails often contain viruses, such as Adware or Spyware - and sometimes even worse – which can seriously disrupt businesses and cost considerable time and money to eradicate.

For small businesses, perhaps already on tight financial margins, this can be a calamity.

At messagestream.com we would urge small businesses to invest in a good and thorough spam filter system, for their own protection. We have a range of spam services that can screen emails for unwanted junk and quarantine these before they clog up the inbox. (They can be parked there for a few days, so that staff can check, at their leisure, to ensure no genuine email has been wrongly identified.)

These systems will ensure staff time is not wasted on endless spam, whilst genuine emails can be dealt with promptly. The whole business will be more efficient and productive.