Kristin Potts, director of marketing, Postini Corp., advises insurers to:* Secure the enterprise e-mail network at the perimeter. This protects e-mail addresses from being stolen through a technique called directory harvest attacks. Once the e-mail address is stolen, it is sold to spammers.
* Build a strong e-mail usage policy that offers guidelines on best practices that may diminish the amount of spam. This helps protect companies in cases where employees who receive offensive e-mail may file harassment lawsuits.
Chris Kraft, director of product management, ActiveState Corp. advises:
* Use absolute caution before inputting an e-mail address on any form whatsoever on the Internet. Check the privacy policy first.
* Be careful about joining newsgroups and giving them your e-mail address. Spammers use tools to "crawl" the Internet looking at newsgroup Web sites to harvest e-mail addresses.
* To avoid this kind of harvesting, use the word "at" instead of the symbol
* Insurers should solve the spam problem at the gateway to their enterprise network.
