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Dealing With Spam Email

Seems like every day there is more and more spam entering our e-mail boxes. It seems to frustrate everybody involved with the exception of the spammers themselves. Unfortunately for us, it seems that the spammers are quite an intelligent bunch. They’re finding new and intuitive ways to get around spam filtering on a constant basis. The latest attack involves taking advantage of the Achilles’ heel of spam filtering, pattern recognition. Today’s anti-spam devices solely depend upon recognizing spam through pattern recognition. In a nutshell, the anti-spam advice will receive a piece of spam e-mail which is usually flagged by a human and then every e-mail that looks exactly the same or close will also be flagged as spam.

Unfortunately the spammers have caught on to us. With a little bit of programming and ingenuity they are creating intelligent e-mail generators that will alter the spam messages just enough between mailings to confound the pattern recognition software in place today. The end effect is that we are getting a lot more spam than ever before. And I don’t see a change in this trend unless spam software gets a whole lot better. I have one company who runs their own spam filters and they’re using state-of-the-art spam protection devices. On a daily basis this company receives well over 500 spam e-mails per day that are caught and immediately cleaned by the system. But unfortunately about another 200 get through. These are the e-mails that I’m talking about that are confounding the current anti-spam filtering devices.

I’ve done everything that I can to combat this current problem but I just cannot see how we can eradicate it completely. The spam messages are just simply too unique between mailings to be caught. Only the view from the human eye catches them immediately. Actually let me correct myself, some of the spam does look like very legitimate e-mail. Fortunately though I have found a bit of a solution that you could institute today. This involves continuing to use outside spam filtering devices but then using other spam filtering devices on top of that.

So step one, is to ensure that your e-mail provider is performing some level of spam filtering. This will remove the bulk of spam e-mails that you could receive. Next, consider upgrading to a real e-mail package like the one available for Netscape or Outlook. Avoid Outlook express as it cannot perform this function at this time. Enable the anti-spam filtering within the e-mail package. Learn how it works and learn how it can help you filter out the majority of the spam that does get through. Taking an hour or two to understand your e-mail software Spam filtering function can save you many hours of trying to remove spam from your e-mail box in the future. Performing this to step spam filtering procedure, should increase your spam detection to well over 90%.


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