Anti-virus warning from newspaper publisher

PRESS agencies and advertising companies that fail to keep their email anti-virus software up-to-date risk having their emails sent to at least one major newspaper publisher automatically deleted.

The warning comes from John Reid, IT director of Trinity Mirror – publishers of, among others, the Daily Record and Sunday Mail newspaper.

Last week, Reid was appearing at Newstec – a conference for senior editorial and IT managers in the newspaper industry – in the capacity as chair of Adfast, an organisation that sends camera-ready adverts to regional newspapers and owned by the Newspaper Society.

There, he revealed that, typically, 65-75 per cent of emails sent to Trinity Mirror are filtered out and that, on occasion, it has been as much as 99.9 per cent of emails are binned.

Said Reid, who splits his time between London and his home in Renfrewshire: “The danger is that, once you get noticed as an organisation responsible for sending emails with a virus, the filters then are more likely to block you in the future.”