What are anti-spam programs?

Anti-Spam Software

If anyone hates spam, I hate spam! I’m not alone in this. In fact, there’s even an anti-spam program named “I hate spam.”At one point, my inbox was regularly flooded with hundreds of junk email messages per day. Part of this was due to the fact that my email address was posted on the company’s website where it was quickly harvested by spammers. In addition, the company hosting this particular website and its related email features offered limited spam filtering. Dealing with hundreds of spam messages each day put a real damper on my productivity. And let’s not even talk about what happened when I went on a two week vacation. Let me put it this way: the lettering of the delete key on my keyboard rubbed off completely due to overuse.

At first, I tried filtering out spam on my own using the Message Rules feature in my email client. Every time I received a junk email, I’d add keywords to my message rules such as: Viagra, sex, XXX, porn, mortgage, debt counseling, enlargement, and so on. While this worked on a small scale, it took a great deal of effort on my part and it barely made a dent in the flood of spam. In addition, unless I was careful, it affected my legitimate emails.

For example, what if I listed my house for sale and my real estate agent sent me an email with the following message: We have a buyer who has pre-qualified for a mortgage. Call me right away! I’m at the Sussex office today.

According to my message rules, it would be deleted! This example represents a legitimate email containing the words “mortgage” and “sex” (Sussex) but I would never have seen it using my rough spam filtering system.

Anti-spam programs helped me solve my problem. These programs are far more sophisticated than I’ll ever be (at least in the realm of spam control). Most use algorithm analysis and learning engines to determine whether a message is legitimate or spam. Content-based anti-spam programs look at the contents of a message and compare their findings to a database. Since spammers are notorious for changing their tricks to work around spam filtering, these algorithms and databases are constantly updated.

In addition to content filtering, most anti-spam programs also let users mark messages as spam (part of the learning engine) as well as trust or block senders. For example, a “whitelist” of trusted senders is a list that you create. If I were to place the real estate agent in the whitelist, I would receive any message sent regardless of content. Likewise, I could block a sender and never receive a single message from that “blacklisted” sender ever again.

Anti-spam software isn’t perfect. Sometimes, legitimate email messages are marked as spam and routed to the “junk mail” folder. While it is possible to browse the junk mail folder and look at all of the spam in search of legitimate emails, I don’t really see the point. If I wanted to look at all of that spam, I wouldn’t have invested in an anti-spam solution! The fact is that I don’t want to look at emails hawking Viagra and debt relief counseling. That’s why it’s critical to choose an anti-spam program that is efficient and good at accurately filtering spam. Look for a program that has adjustable filtering levels. It takes a little bit of tweaking to find the right balance. However, with an efficient anti-spam program, white and black lists, and the appropriate filtering level, your spam problems will be a thing of the past.