Avoiding Spam

Like most of you, we fight a daily battle against Spam.  Personally, I get about 200-250 emails a day and some days as many as 100 of them are Spam. 

Not only do we have to waste our time identifying and deleting unwanted ads for diet and sex aids, mortgages and credit cards, travel bargains and Internet email lists, we also have to take the risk that any of this unsolicited trash might contain a virus.

It’s no wonder that a new industry, offering Spam Aid, has sprung up.  Of course, we’ve been looking at some of the offered software and we have some questions to ask you:

1. Have you tried a Spam Filter?
   
   We wonder what your experience was.  We’ve tried a few and haven’t found one to stick with yet.  
   
   I love the idea of avoiding Spam, but we hate the idea of offending someone by not getting their mail or, worse yet, sending them a filter-generated note that says “I won’t accept your mail until you get onto my permission list.  Fill out this form first.”
   
   Some filters seem to affect the performance of your email or your computer (not because they’re bad, but because the combination of your hardware, software, connection, and filter does something weird – no one can test for every combination.
   
   

2. How did it work?”
   
   Some Spam avoidance schemes maintain big lists of known “spammers” and simply won’t send you mail from them.  The trouble with this is that the spammers just keep changing their addresses and reappearing.  
   
   Some Spam avoidance schemes depend on the community of all their users reporting Spammers to a list the community will share.  They make it easy to report newly identified Spammers to the list.  Usually, they don’t actually discard Spam, but place it in a special folder outside your Inbox so that you may review it, if you prefer, before deleting. And accept delivery if you don’t believe something is actually Spam.  
   
   A few schemes have the idea that you will tell the filter who you would like to receive mail from.  You won’t receive mail from anyone else.  This works best if : 

Your correspondents can be easily put into the list from an existing source such as a database or address book.

There’s a scheme to explain what’s going on to rejected mailers and to offer them a way to request permission to enter your mailbox.

NOTE – PLEASE READ THIS:  This is what I’m actually interested in:  Are we so fed up with Spam that we’re willing to agree to this amount of inconvenience and not get mad at each other when we have to fill out a permission slip for each person we want to email to who hasn’t got us on their original list?

3. Who did the filtering?  

It turns out that filtering can (and is) performed at many levels, by ISP’s, corporate mail servers, and individuals.  The tools work differently in each case and your reaction to them may, too.

ISP’s typically use tools like Brightmail (www.brightmail.com/) which, with its 45% market share, is probably the most widely used tool in its class.  It allows the ISP to use various publicly available Spam lists and tools as well as those provided within the product.  It removes spammers mailing rights to avoid future Spam, but these kinds of products can paint with a pretty broad brush. 

Example:  Recently I was trying to send my daughter an email asking her about our weekend plans.  Her ISP kept sending back my email, rejecting it as Spam.  I thought they were crazy, so I called them.  They informed me that the server my mail was coming from (it belongs to a major national ISP) had been identified as a server that had a Spammer on it, so they had blocked it in their filter.  I notified my ISP who has dealt with the problem and corrected it.  This took two hours of my time and, in case you’re wondering, I wasn’t amused.

Spam software for Company Email Servers generally focuses on keeping Spam outside of the company to prevent its impact on system and worker performance.  It usually uses a combination of blocking the addresses of non-Spammers (lists which are constantly updated, much like Virus Software and its downloaded descriptions) and letting systems administrators use rules to block out other types of Spam by names of URL’s or their keyword content.  A popular product is Lyris Mailshield  (www.lyris.com/products/mailshield/ ).

Individuals and Small Businesses are offered free or low-cost packages for individual systems such as McAfee SpamKiller http://www.mcafee.com/myapps/msk/default.asp), Cloudmark SpamNet (http://www.cloudmark.com/) or a variety of Free Software downloads (http://www.webattack.com/Freeware/comm/fwspam.shtml).

Until we get legislation that makes it illegal to Spam, we’re probably going to see a lot more people using anti-Spam software.  So let me know if I have your permission to ask your permission to send me email.  I hate to offend my readers, friends, clients, or anyone who has something interesting to say. 

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