In this article, we look at how spam filers work and what can be done to ensure that our legitimate emails reach their target and aren’t wrongly filtered out as ‘spam’ .

Why We Need Spam Filters

Although we’re focusing on how to avoid spam filters, it’s worth noting how important they are to businesses. Figures vary between surveys but around half of email is known to be spam and more than 90 per cent of malware arrives in spam emails. For example, Gmail in 2020 recorded blocking more than 100 million phishing emails with its filtering system, and figures (Statista) from September 2020 show 88.88 billion spam emails were being sent worldwide every day.

It is therefore necessary to filter our emails to stop our email boxes from becoming filled with irrelevant and possibly dangerous emails such as phishing emails. Filtering out unwanted emails also makes it much easier to see our important emails. Bear in mind, mailbox providers have a commercial interest in wanting users to continue using their service and having an effective spam filter can help this happen.

How Spam Filters Work / Spam Filter Types

Spam filters vary in their design across mailbox providers, but there are broadly several types that use different signals and scores to judge an email as being spam (and direct them to your spam folder). For example:

– Bayesian filters (and other heuristic filters) spot suspicious word patterns and frequencies in messages.

– Blocklist filters block and remove emails from senders who are identified on a spammers list.

– Content filters, as the name suggests, study the contents of an email with regards to language, such as words often used by spammers (special offer, discount) and inappropriate language. There are also ‘language filters’ but these are used to filter out messages with a different geographic language than that’s indicted by the recipient.

– Header filters study an email’s legitimacy based on the characteristics of its header e.g., the IP address.

– Rule-based filters apply rules established by users to incoming emails to decide whether they are delivered to the spam filter rather than the inbox. For example, these rules could be based on words or phrases in the message or header.

Other spam filtering judgements may be made using:

– Engagement rates. For example, if a (sender) mailbox has a high number of emails that are sent, not looked-at at then deleted, this could indicate low engagement (a sign of spam) and lead to an email being filtered out.

– Low mailbox activity. If an email box is rarely used apart from sending out large numbers of emails at once, this can be judged to indicate that it is a spam email account.

– Identification and reputation (a reputation score signalling how trustworthy your emails are) are often the main reasons why emails land in the inbox or the spam folder, not just the email’s content.

Getting Your Emails Past Spam Filters

Most of us, however, are not spammers and have legitimate marketing, business, and personal messages, sent with good intentions that we need to ensure at least reach their target, hopefully to get read. Ways that emails can beat spam filters include:

– Whitelisting : Since most major email providers (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) automatically exempt whitelisted addresses from more scanning, ask known contacts to whitelist your email address in their spam filter, or to add your address to their contact list.

– Use Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) and DMARC email authentication. For example, attaching DKIM signatures to an email (as an encrypted header), SPF records to link your emails back to the domain, and the DMARC protocol to protect your domain from unauthorised use e.g., spoofing are all (more technical) ways to indicate that your emails are not spam.

– Where possible, avoid using spam trigger words in the header and content of an email e.g., buy, ‘double your’, XXX, earn, cash bonus, etc. There are many large lists of spam trigger words online and the guiding principles are to avoid anything that is sensationalising or over-promising.

– Personalise emails e.g., with the recipient’s first name. This indicates that the email is less likely to be unsolicited.

– Avoid using odd formatting (to stand out), strange use of punctuation or strangely formatted fonts. All of these are common signs of spam.

– Keep your email deliverability rates high e.g., keep your email list clean (remove inactive users and invalid emails), make sure emails are compliant with current web laws, and add engaging text.

– Only provide links to reputable websites.

– Include an unsubscribe button/link in marketing emails.

– Pay attention to spelling and grammar – use spelling/grammar checkers, and proof-read emails.

– Make sure the ‘sent from’ name is easily recognisable e.g., your name and business name together.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The number of different factors that spam filters use to spot and isolate spam is, of course, good for us all, but can make it more challenging to design legitimate business emails that make it to their target. Paying attention to basic rules and checks (spelling, grammar, formatting, links, personalising, avoiding spam trigger words) and using a legitimate, well-maintained email account/platform with a clean list can provide a good basis for getting past spam filters. Looking into using SPF, DKIM and DMARC may also be worthwhile. It is important to get the best ROI in terms of time and money spent in creating and sending marketing and company communications emails and designing-in deliverability of emails is, therefore, vital.

Here are 3 tips/tricks for Google Chrome to help with queries and searches that can be typed directly into the address bar (also known as the Onnibox):

Find websites that are similar

– For example, type related:bbc.co.uk

– This will deliver results showing similar (media) websites.

– The same type of search can be carried out for any website.

Use Google Chrome as a calculator

– Type in the required calculation For example, 2*3+8.

– The returned result will show the answer (14) loaded into calculator which you can use for more calculations.

Use a search term and site: to search a specific website for specific term

– To look for specific reference for a term in a whole website try, for example, Sandwiches site:bbc.co.uk

– This should return all the pages in the site where that term is used.

With Microsoft poised to increase its first substantive commercial pricing increase for Microsoft 365 since the company launched Office 365 a decade ago, we take a look at the added benefits and value and the justification behind the price changes.

Six Months Ago

Microsoft made its official announcements about which prices it would change and by how much back in August 2021. The new prices for its commercial products come into effect on March 1, 2022 and range from increases of 9 per cent to 25 per cent depending on the product. However, as the company points out, some considerable value has been added to its services over the last 10 years that may more than justify the increases.

Value-Adding Innovation Over 10 Years

It would be hard to disagree that Microsoft 365 has dramatically improved its products over the last 10 years, mostly thanks to re-investment and keeping its products relevant to business needs. In fact, since the introduction of 365, the company has added no less than 1,400 features, and 24 apps to the suites! (Microsoft Teams, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Stream, Planner, Visio, OneDrive, Yammer, and Whiteboard).

Security

One extremely important challenge for businesses and organisations to tackle in today’s business environment is cyber security, both for business continuity and compliance. In fairness, Microsoft 365 has added plenty of security capabilities over the years to keep businesses ahead of prevailing threats. For example, data loss prevention (DLP) for email and documents, sensitivity labels, and message encryption help guard valuable company data and Content Search, as well as eDiscovery, and core Litigation Hold to help with compliance.

The Hybrid Working Security Challenge

Hybrid working has proven to be another big challenge to security for businesses and organisations around the world. On this point, Microsoft is keen to highlight how its “Built-in mobile device management (MDM) and other management tools like Microsoft Endpoint Manager help admins support remote and hybrid workforces.”

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI is a technology that’s transforming many areas of business automation. Microsoft has also added many AI elements to 365. For example, cloud-powered AI helps create maps, charts, and tables in Excel, as well as sorting and uncluttering Outlook. Plus, AI-powered real-time translation, captions, and transcription have now been added to improve collaboration and communication.

Competition

There are, of course, other cloud-based productivity suite options for businesses such as the more browser-centric Google Workspace, Zoho Workspace, and more. For most businesses it’s a case of finding the best fit with the installed base of hardware, using a familiar environment that fits the needs and workflow of the organisation. As the marketing people at Microsoft know all too well, in respect of the classic relationship within the often-cited ‘Porter’s 5 Forces’, the company has considerable supplier power but there’s always competitive rivalry and threats of substitution, and its price rise can’t just be based on its market power.

Teams

It would also be difficult not to note the important contribution that Microsoft Teams has made to many businesses during the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions. Although by no means the only collaborative working platform around (e.g. Zoom, Slack) Microsoft Teams (launched in 2017) proved to be the right solution at the right time for many, providing a practical way forward at the most uncertain time in living memory.

It is not surprising that with staff suddenly finding themselves working remotely and businesses having to undergo rapid digital transformations, with Teams already being part of Microsoft’s suite, it proved very popular. In fact, as far back as pre-pandemic December 2019, it was reported as having 20 million daily active users, and when the first lockdown hit in March 2020, Microsoft reported that Teams saw a massive 12 million user boost in one week!

Today, Teams has become the main communications platform for many businesses and organisations across the UK and Microsoft has put some considerable effort and investment into keeping it that way. For example, in 2020 over 300 new capabilities were added to Teams (Together mode, background effects, large gallery view, and more). Also, collaborative applications in Teams have been added to help with hybrid working e.g., Power Platform, Whiteboard, Lists, Planner, Shifts, Forms, and SharePoint, plus there are now many popular third-party apps that can integrate with Teams e.g., Adobe, Atlassian, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday.

Other Teams Boosts

Other ways that Microsoft has boosted the power and value of Teams are, for example, by introducing features like real-time collaboration in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint desktop apps, as well as adding and expanding OneDrive cloud storage and the Exchange Online mailboxes. Unlimited dial-in capabilities for Teams has also been introduced across Microsoft’s enterprise, business, frontline, and government suites.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Price increases are never great news for businesses but after such a long time with no substantive increases, it was to be expected. 10 years is a particularly long time in the tech world where many huge changes can take place and there’s no doubt that Microsoft has invested in (and improved) Office 365 to transform it into the Microsoft 365 of today. The use of the cloud and apps like Teams have proven vital over the lasts two years of remote and hybrid working and, as Microsoft points out, continuous innovation has been the way that it has tried to keep its products relevant, and this is the key justification behind its March commercial price rises. In a forthcoming article, we’ll take a look at the price rise figures and some of the opinions and reactions by tech commentators and in the marketplace.

The ICO launched an investigation after more than 1,000 Sussex and Surrey police officers were found to have downloaded a free app to covertly record calls with members of the public on police-issued phones.

Google Play Store App

The app, free to download for the Google Play Store, and called ‘Another Call Recorder’ (ACR), had been approved for use in 2017 for negotiators when dealing with kidnaps/hostage and other crisis situations. The app, which reportedly works best on older Android phones is able to record and store all incoming and outgoing calls made on a mobile by accessing the microphone and the speaker’s data feeds, and by saving the recordings to the phone’s storage.

Problem – No Means To Restrict

As discovered by the ICO, the fact that any police officers were able to download the app for free from Google Play meant that its use couldn’t be restricted to just the purpose that it was originally approved for. The ICO’s investigation found, therefore, that the app had been used to make “indiscriminate” covert recordings of calls with members of the public on 700 police phones (545 installations of the app by Sussex, and 238 by Surrey). The indiscriminate, widespread, and apparently arbitrary use of the app by Police was stopped after Surrey and Sussex forces found out about the practice in March 2020 and referred themselves to the ICO and the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office (ICPO) four months later.

Disclosure

The main legal issue to be investigated was that of ‘disclosure,’ i.e., whether it breached the Investigatory Powers Act by amounting to unlawful “interception” of a communication by means of a private or public telecommunication system.

Other potential legal issues relating to the use of the app could include:

– Whether the other party on the call had been warned that they were being recorded (relating to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights).

– Whether usage of the app may have breached data protection laws e.g., if it was used to record calls relating to a minor crime, rather than the major crime of hijacking that it has been passed for use with.

The Findings

The IPCO’s investigation concluded that:

– The app was recording the communication while it was being transmitted, which constituted recording at a “relevant time.”

– The version of the app used by police didn’t allow recordings of the calls to be automatically uploaded to cloud services i.e., didn’t make them available to a third party while in the course of transmission; it was only available to the app user once the recording had been stored locally on the device. This meant that the conduct was not sufficient by itself to render the call recording “interception”. Also, the IPCO concluded that the installation and use of the app is not interception.

– Since telephone calls are protected under Article 8, European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) the use of the app by police did constitute ‘covert’ surveillance i.e., it did not warn the other party that they were being recorded.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It is a little shocking that hundreds of members of two police forces were using a free app for years to make arbitrary, covert recordings of people, without their consent or knowledge, and did not know that this could constitute a breach of laws. It should be noted that the particular app used by the police is in contrast to apps used by businesses, such as Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams and Zoom because these do inform users when a participant records the call, and their recording feature automatically warns all other parties.

As the IPCO report pointed-out, however, both forces, upon discovery of the issue, promptly brought it to the attention of the relevant authorities and took immediate steps on their own to stop the usage of the app and remove it from devices. In this case, because the app kept the recordings on the phone itself and didn’t send them to a third-party (the cloud) it was deemed not to be interception.

In the business world, a Prospect trade union poll from last November showed that 32 per cent of UK workers are being remotely monitored and tracked by employers. There is concern about a lack of regulation at present and the issue of consent is very important. Businesses should note that under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, individuals have a non-absolute right to respect for their private and family life and correspondence, and (UK) GDPR has some important details relating to data protection and consent that need to be considered. For businesses who want to monitor their employees, however, the broad rules are that workers are entitled to some privacy at work, and employers must tell employees about any monitoring arrangements and the reason for it. Also, employers should have procedures in place setting out what is and what isn’t allowed, and these procedures should be made clear and understood by all workers before monitoring begins. Generally, employers must have a genuine reason to conduct any covert monitoring such as criminal activities or malpractice, and any monitoring should be limited, targeted and within certain times, with employers having regard for private communications.

Los Angeles based Nanotech Energy claims to have developed a fireproof, graphene-based lithium-ion battery that could be safer for Electric Vehicles.

What Is Graphene?

Extracted from graphite, graphene is a single layer (monolayer) of carbon atoms, tightly bound in a two-dimensional, hexagonal honeycomb lattice nanostructure. First observed through electron microscopes in 1962, it was re-discovered in 2004 (although Nanotech says 2002). Graphene has exceptionally high tensile strength – 10 times that of steel, electrical conductivity, transparency, is the thinnest two-dimensional material in the world, and is the second-strongest material in the world (to Borophene).

What Causes Fires With Traditional Lithium-Ion Batteries?

Volume changes (expansion) of lithium-ion battery electrodes during charge and discharge can cause an internal short circuit, which can lead to a fire. Also, lithium-ion batteries can catch fire if they have been improperly manufactured or damaged, or if the software that operates the battery isn’t designed correctly. Lithium-ion batteries can sometimes also simply overheat during charging.

In the case of using lithium-ion batteries in EV’s, the use of organic liquid electrolytes (the battery’s most flammable component), which can be volatile and flammable when operating at high temperatures can increase the fire risk e.g., if a car-crash causes a chemical leakage.

How Is A Graphene-Based Battery Different?

The new graphene-based battery from Nanotech is reported to be different because:

– It has graphene electrodes i.e., the positive (cathode) and negative (anode) terminals. This helps the battery to withstand its volume changes during charge and discharge, thereby reducing the potential fire risk. Also, with graphene being a highly effective conductor of electricity, it can help the battery to keep a lower internal resistance and temperature, thereby helping to prevent overheating during charging.

– It uses a non-flammable, stable, and inexpensive proprietary electrolyte solution, called Organolyte™. A non-flammable electrolyte means a dramatically reduced fire risk.

– It has a new proprietary separator. The graphene battery electrodes must be separated by a material through which the ions transfer. Instead of using a typical polyolefin separator Nanotech Energy has developed a new separator material that improves stability and makes the battery safer.

Performance

In terms of performance, Nanotech reports that the battery retains more than 80 percent of its rated capacity through 1,400 cycles and can charge “18 times faster than anything that is currently available on the market”. The battery is also reported to be able to maintain performance at extreme temperatures (-40 to 140 degrees F), hold charge at temperatures as high as 350 degrees, and won’t catch fire if damaged with a nail or heated to more than 1,300 degrees.

Easy To Manufacture And Better For The Environment.

Other reported benefits of the new battery are that it doesn’t require exotic materials and can be relatively easily manufactured on existing equipment in various form factors (cylindrical, pouch, etc.). Also, Nanotech says that using graphene-based batteries could help develop more cost-efficient, environmentally friendly personal electronic devices to create a more efficient way to harness renewable energy.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

EV’s are the way forward for domestic and commercial transport, but one of the big challenges that EV manufactures have faced is developing a battery that requires infrequent charging, charges very quickly, is durable, can go a long way on a charge, and is safe. This new graphene-based battery certainly appears to address the safety, fast charging and durability issues, and the fact that it is relatively easy to manufacture using existing equipment (keeping costs down) is also a big bonus. This discovery could go some way to helping push the EV market forward if widely adopted, although initial production looks set to concentrate on the consumer electronics market rather than electric vehicles pending more testing time. This means that these batteries may not go into big commercial production for another year, and there are still other EV challenges to overcome, such as meeting the charging network demand.