Anti Spam Measures

Anti-Spam Measures

Eliminate Junk Mail in your Inbox

Web users are extremely worried about the growth of unsolicited bulk email, commonly referred to as spam. Recipients of large quantities of spam find it too difficult and time-consuming to separate it from their desired correspondence.

Spammers use mailbots to collect addresses from newsgroups and the Web. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, and quick-money schemes.

There are a variety of anti-spamming solutions available. Completely automated solutions bounce or delete all suspected spam, while semi-automated solutions separate suspected spam for manual examination. Most of the filtering solutions involve filtering messages from known spam senders based on information in message headers. Pattern matchers can sometimes identify spam based on information within the body of a message.

Content-based filtering provides better protection against spam. In content-based filtering, the actual content of the e-mail messages is examined, rather than checking to see if the source of the e-mail message has originated from a known spammer.

Spam filtering is not a perfect science. Blocking and filtering will reduce the volume of unsolicited e-mails hitting mail servers, but will not completely eliminate spam. 99% of the Spam detected by filtering is truly SPAM email. But there is always that 1% that could be legitimate email.

Some ISPs have started using filters that reject all messages from non-registered domains. On receipt of a message for delivery to an account on the ISP, the mail agent tries to decode the SMTP envelope address in the mail. If the domain name contained within the address does not exist in the domain name service, the message is rejected.

Never add your address to email directories. Leave the email address field in generic web forms blank, or give a decoy address. Remember to make one primary e-mail account for your friends, family, and colleagues and another account for mailing lists, newsgroups, and web forms.

Set the filters of your email software's filtering tool. If a message does not include your correct email address in the To: or Cc: field, trash it. Take note of the domains that frequently send you junk mail, just block them. Filter out messages that contain a typical subject line like "make money online."

Spam reports should be send to the appropriate reporting address for that domain. Abuse.net is a good place to find this type of information. If no address is registered at abuse. net, the proper reporting address can be determined by visiting the website and locating the information in the contact page or in the TOS/AUP of the provider or an SMTP verify of abuse@domain or checking various other website compilations of abuse address listings.

Spam is more than just a nuisance. It results in loss of bandwidth, productivity and network capacity. Employees waste time either reading or deleting these mails. Nearly 20 percent of all mail server crashes are due to spam.

There is growing concern that the bulk mailers may adopt increasingly sophisticated techniques to spoil automated filtering tools. Webmasters have done their best to fight the abusive mail, and they continue to keep up with the latest technology.