OPINION
Has spam finally met its match?
21-08-2002
by Ralph Averbuch
If you're tired of spam -- and who isn't? -- a new piece of software can protect you without blocking mail you want.
If, like me, you have come to rely on e-mail as 'the' way you conduct business communications, you've probably also realised e-mail is a double-edged sword. It's so easy to communicate with others, but it's equally easy for them to communicate with you. I'm increasingly finding my e-mail address 'leaking out,' resulting in a barrage of junk e-mail. Junk e-mailers seem to be consummate at collecting e-mail addresses, and woe betide anyone who actually responds to say 'take me off your list.' All you actually do is tell them that you are a live target.
According to Internet research group Jupiter, consumers will receive 206 billion junk e-mailings in 2006. That's an average of 1,400 per person. Today the number is about half that, or 700 per person.
So I needed a workable solution to my own spam problem. I deal with far more than the average dud messages each week, and it's not my idea of fun. Yet, upon investigation of possible solutions, it was apparent that the options are limited. On the one hand you can set up personal filters or leave programs like Outlook to guess at what is spam. I let Outlook guess for a while, only to discover that it was catching all sorts of stuff I needed to see. It was just too general in its application. I needed something smarter.
Next I considered server-side solutions such as SpamAssassin. Conceptually this looks like a great idea. You, or your ISP, stick it on the mail server and it does a number of things to spot known spammer tricks, including analysis of the header information in your e-mails, analysis of text for characteristic spamming styles, use of blacklists and a thing called Razor.
Razor is a collaborative spam-tracking database, which works by taking a signature of spam messages. Since spam typically operates by sending an identical message to lots of people, Razor circumvents this by letting the first person who receives a spam add it to the database. At this point everyone else will automatically block it.
For these reasons this seems like a really powerful solution...until I looked into it a little further. This sort of solution never truly puts you in the driving seat to decide what is or isn't spam. It relies on seeking out 'known' Spammer tricks, such as a line IN ALL CAPS or the use of words related to sex; so before you know it, there are so many triggers in the average correspondence that plenty of legitimate mail gets caught in the cross-fire. Equally, spam lists tend to be based on as few as two or three complaints, labelling a lot of legitimate messages as spam in the process. If this subject is close to your heart, check out this column by Steve Outing.
BLOCK THE BAD, NOT THE GOOD
Just as I was coming to the conclusion that I was going to have to rely on the best spam filter of them all -- myself -- I happened across a little-known client-side solution worth further investigation. Called SpamNet and developed by an outfit called Cloudmark, it works by using a combination of Razor and human beings. Here's how it works, although at the moment it works only for Outlook.
SpamNet compares your inbound e-mail against a list of known spam messages kept remotely on Cloudmark's servers. When a mail is marked as spam, it gets moved to a spam folder created in Outlook. That way, if you happen to subscribe to a newsletter that uses ALL CAPS in its headline or mentions Viagra or breast cancer, you'll still be able to find it in your junk mail file.
SpamNet says it catches about 75 percent of incoming spam, but in the last three weeks I've been using it, it's been more like 95 percent. In a couple of instances I found e-mails that I'd subscribed to -- the Daily Dilbert cartoon and a daily newswire summary -- that ended up in the spam folder. All I had to do was select the relevant message and then click the 'unblock' button at the top of the Outlook control bar.
SpamNet installs just two buttons on your Outlook toolbar --Block and Unblock. If you find, as I did, that mails you want end up in the spam folder, you just Unblock it. That returns the mail to your inbox and automatically adds the sender to the "white list" of e-mail addresses from which messages will never be tagged as spam.
Conversely, when you find spam that SpamNet let through, you hit the Block button. That moves it to the spam folder, and sends a message to the Cloudmark server relaying the information so it will be moved to their Spam folder when the same message appears in someone else's incoming mail.
And here's the best bit. Each user gains a credibility rating based on their previous reports of spam. This then reflects on whether their "blocks" are added to the Cloudmark database. For extra safety, even if a block comes from a credible source, it waits for multiple credible blocks to occur before a message is sent to the spam database and blocked for all SpamNet users. It works, and it's one of the best instances yet of putting the power of the people at the forefront of the Internet.
SpamNet has almost killed off my spam problems altogether, I'm almost unaware it's there, and it's free to individual users (ISPs and corporates pay). The only drawback is its availability on other e-mail platforms. As a spokesperson from Cloudmark explained, "We are working on support for Outlook Express and are determining demand for other clients as well, possibly Eudora next." But at time of writing there are no timelines on wider availability.
If you happen to be a user of Outlook and you too get hammered with junk mail, I recommend you check out SpamNet.
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