Antispam

NOTE:- Things have moved on since this antispam article was added to The Article Bank.

For one thing, at least when I tried [late April 2008] to access the web address given at the bottom of the article, an error message came up - so maybe the website is no longer available.

And for another thing, in regard to private individuals - nowadays most internet providers have come up with some way of either dealing directly with spam, or, at the very least, putting it into quarantine for their customers.

So, hopefully, spam should become an improving situation for most people.

The article now follows...

Setting up Internet Roadblocks

Antispam. Aren't we all! Don't you just hate it? You've got enough to do without having to sift through a bunch of worthless, or worse yet, offensive junk e-mails in your Inbox. So what can be done about it? What antispam procedures and software really work? Spam filtering software is the first stop in your antispam campaign, but in some ways it's the easiest to subvert.

CAUCE has no treasury and no offices. Completely virtual, the organization exists on the Internet, in newsgroups, and online discussion lists. Donations are not accepted because the CAUCE founders and members believe that would necessitate having to respond to numerous lobbying regulations. CAUCE is now soliciting members, however. While the grassroots of the organization began in the United States - in San Francisco - there are chapters in other parts of the world as well, such as CAUCE Canada, CAUCE India, CAUBE.Au, which covers New Zealand, Australia and all Pacific Rim countries; and Europe's EuroCAUCE. CAUCE can boast more than 20,000 members in the U.S. alone, with all states represented. Even American Samoa and Guam have antispam proponents who have jumped on the CAUCE bandwagon.

Two upgraded versions of these antispam filtering products are Bayesian and heuristic filters, which try to identify offensive messages through recognition of phrases as objectionable. SpamAssassin by Apache is probably the best known example of heuristic filtering. What these filters are doing that the more basic ones aren't is looking at the message itself rather than the subject header. Both Bayesian and heuristic filters have an Achilles heel in that they depend for their filtering on frequency. Were a spammer to send a short message it would get past.

The primary principle for preventing spam is to avoid mailing to a list. We're all tempted to organize our emails into lists - business clients, friends, and so forth. Then we mail them all the same message. Saves time and effort. The problem here is not that you sent out one message but you didn't use the software necessary to hide each person's email from the others.

Some non-profit Internet watchdog agencies started keeping lists of the IP addresses of spammers. When these addresses cropped up in mail they were blocked. The way around this for spammers was simple - they changed IP addresses. The result was even worse, in that those addresses then got handed out to completely innocent folks who now had problems sending e-mail. Then the spammers got really aggressive and started creating and distributing viruses allowing them to hijack IP addresses that weren't on the "spam" lists. Where the answer seems to lie for many businesses and their sites is to bypass standard email communication altogether and resort to online feedback forms for electronic communication. Which of course doesn't resolve the antispam issue for private individuals who have no Web site of their own.

Theodora Shirkey is the owner of Lib Antispam which is an excellent place to find anti spam links, resources and articles. For more information go to: http://www.libantispam.com/

Back to The Article Bank..... from Antispam