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Searching for the perfect Anti Spam appliance can be like the quest for the Holy Grail. You’re never quite sure whether what you’re looking for really exists.

There are a variety of solutions on offer, ranging from disposable email addresses to getting your own anti spam exchange server. I’ve tried most of them. I don’t think I’ve discovered the anti spam software Grail yet, but I’ve made some important discoveries.

Do you need a Spam Solution?

It’s curious. We accept unsolicited advertising in most areas of life. We didn’t ask for advertising on TV or radio, yet we don’t refer to it as spam. We certainly don’t ask for billboards, as if we need something to stare at on our way to work, and yet we don’t normally complain either, and when we do, it tends to be about content, not about the fact that we didn’t ‘opt in’ to billboard advertising as a medium. Yet when unsolicited advertising comes to us in the form of email, we tend to get very upset and not a little self-righteous. What’s the difference?

I assume the difference is that it’s harder to deal with.

With the TV or radio, we simply change channels. With newspapers and billboards, there’s always something else to look at. Yet when unsolicited emails fill our inbox, we can’t just ignore them and hope they’ll go away. At the very least, we have to delete them. And given that spammers routinely try to make their rubbish look like something we were expecting, we have to spend time sorting the wheat from the chaff. When there are only a handful of tares in the wheat, this is manageable. But the longer you stay online, the larger that handful becomes.

Three types of Anti Spam Solutions

1. Prevention is better than cure

Perhaps the most obvious solution is to avoid getting on the spammers’ mailing list in the first place. Some people suggest that if you follow a few basic rules and never give out your email address to companies that you don’t know, you will never end up on spam lists.

Unfortunately this only works up to a point. I’ve found over the years that I get plenty of spam to addresses that I never give out. How do the spammers get me? They generate random addresses until they find me!

The spammers pick major players – AOL, Hotmail, etc. – and send out a million emails to dave000@aol.com, dave002@aol.com, dave003@aol.com, etc. From a million, perhaps only a thousand emails don’t bounce back, but that means they’ve found 1000 real people, and they’ll now keep those addresses, mail to them again, and sell the addresses to other spammers!

Bottom line: you can’t avoid the spammers forever.

Of course, you can keep changing email addresses and so keep one step ahead of the spammers. Disposable email addresses are not hard to find nowadays. The problem here though is that you end up wasting more time than you save. Keeping all your contacts up to date with your ever-changing email address is likely to consume far more time than a daily clean-out of your inbox?

2. Anti Spam Inbox Filters

The second type of spam appliances are those that sort through the email that is in your inbox and throw it out before you get to it.

These programs generally require both an initial anti spam software purchase and an ongoing subscription, as file definitions continually need to be updated.

This type of solution is superior to thinking that you can avoid being spammed. It is not ideal though. Three reasons:

It can be quite expensive.

The spam is still downloaded to your inbox. This can take up a lot of time if you’re receiving between two and three hundred spams per day (as I do).

It is never 100% accurate. The technology of offensive weaponry always stays ahead of defensive weaponry. Hence spammers will most likely always be a step ahead of those who are trying to keep them out. Some spam will get through, and even more importantly, some emails you wanted to receive will be mistakenly weeded out as spam!
Now admittedly, with this last problem, most inbox-based anti spam solutions do allow you to review the emails that they’ve flagged as spam before you delete them, but this takes you back to the task of sorting through all your emails, and the whole idea of your anti spam appliance is that it’s supposed to free you up from doing this!

3. Server-based Anti Spam Solutions

In my opinion, server-based Anti Spam solutions are the way to go.

Most commonly, this solution just invokes filters, similar to those used in the inbox-based anti spam solutions. But the difference is that you don’t have to waste time waiting for the rubbish to download nor do you spend time installing updated filter definitions every week.

Another type of server-based anti spam filter is that used by Spam Arrest, who are my Anti Spam Appliance of choice.

What makes Spam Arrest different is that they don’t actually filter anybody out. They just bounce back an email to the sender, asking them if they will identify themselves as a real human being.

The system works on the assumption that most spammers are not personally sending and receiving their emails, but have mindless machines that do it for them. So when some machine sends you an email automatically, it will reside in the ‘unverified’ box on your server until you decide to either verify it or let the system delete it after a few months.

Spam Arrest is not the only company that takes this approach. There may be better systems out there by now? Look around for yourself. Check out the various options. I can’t tell you with certainty which software anti spam solution is the best one for you, but I’d encourage you to be clear about one thing. The problem with spam is that it wastes time. Beware of spam solutions that waste as much time as they save!

Rev. David B. Smith (the ‘Fighting Father’)

Parish priest, community worker, martial arts master, pro boxer, father, author, Internet Marketer http://www.marketingwithintegrity.org

Get a free preview copy of Dave’s book, Sex, the Ring & the Eucharist when you sign up for his free newsletter at http://www.fatherdave.org

Author: David B. Smith
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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Bayesian spam filtering technique is a great way of filtering out the spam from reaching your inbox. M. Sahami, S. Dumais, D. Heckerman, and E. Horvitz proposed this technique in “A Bayesian approach to filtering junk e-mail” in 1998, but until it was described in a paper by Paul Graham, in 2002, it gained no attention. Thereafter, it has become a great technique for distinguishing legitimate email from the illegitimate spam mail. Modern email programs use the Bayesian spam filtering techniques, and so do the server-side email filters, which at times, embed the function of the Bayesian spam filters within the mail server software itself.

The Bayesian spam filters works by analyzing and then calculating the probability of the contents in the email being spam. It self-builds a list of characteristics of spam as well as good elements in the message. Based on the analysis, the message is classified as spam or legitimate. After the message has been classified, the spam filter is further trained on a per-user basis. This is the advantage of Bayesian anti spam filters.

Most spam one receives is more often than not related to one’s activities online. You may have subscribed to an online newsletter, which could be considered as spam. This newsletter, like other newsletters from the same source, is likely to contain common words, such as its name and its email address, from where it originated. Your Bayesian filter will analyze the contents, identify the characteristics, and assign a higher rate of probability to its being spam. All this is based on your specific user activity.

Legitimate emails you receive are different from the spam, and the Bayesian anti spam filter will assign a lower rate of probability of its being spam. In an environment where you receive corporate emails from the same source, the mails will have the same company name, and the names of the clients or customers. These will be analyzed as legitimate by your Bayesian filter.

The Bayesian spam filter’s accuracy improves over time. It analyzes the characteristics that allow it to assess the probability, and whenever the filter incorrectly classifies a message, its corrective training takes over. The probability of each word is unique to each individual user.

The Bayesian filter is exceptional in avoiding false positives. If the email you receive contains the words ‘Nigeria’ or ‘lottery’, which have frequently been seen in spam messages, your Bayesian anti spam filter would probably put it down as a probable, and not reject it outright, as a normal spam filter might. It would look for other characteristics to classify the message. If the mail happens to be from your spouse, it would indicate its legitimacy, and your Bayesian spam filter would overcome the probable spam words.

Author is admin and technical expert associated with development of computer security and performance enhancing software like Registry Cleaner, Anti Spyware, Window Cleaner and Anti Spam Filter. Learn how Anti Spam filter helps in securing online privacy. Visit our Home page or Resource center to read more about products and download free trial of a range of security and performance enhancing software like

• Windows Registry Cleaner
• Anti Spyware and Anti Adware
• Windows and Internet Cleaner
• Anti Spam Filter for MS Outlook
• Anti Spam Filter for Outlook Express

Author: Arvind Singh
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Guest blogger

Bayesian spam filters, which are a type of scoring content-based spam filters, analyze the contents of the mail, and calculate the probability of the message being spam. It builds up a list of characteristics of elements that are typically spam as well as good emails. The advantage of the Bayesian spam filters is that they build up the list of characteristics themselves, and do not depend on the manually built list.

Bayesian anti spam filters more or less try to emulate how you personally identify your spam emails. One look at an email tells you whether the email is genuine or spam. The probability that you will characterize a good mail as spam is ‘zero’. Ideally, it would be great if spam filters do work in the same way. At least, the Bayesian filters are trying in this direction.

Spam Filtering

Suppose that the word ‘textile’ often appears in your legitimate mails, but never in your spam mails, then there is zero probability of the word ‘textile’ indicating spam. On the other hand, the words ‘Nigeria’ and ‘lottery’ quite often and at times most exclusively, appear as spam – made famous by the 419 scams out of Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa.

For Bayesian spam filters, these two words ‘Nigeria’ and ‘lottery’ have every probability of being found in spam emails – as much as 100 percent.

Whenever you receive a new message, the Bayesian anti spam filter analyzes it, and calculates, by using the individual characteristics, the probability of it being a spam. If it so happens that your message contains both words, ‘textiles’ and ‘Nigeria’ or ‘lottery’, the Bayesian spam filter cannot ascertain whether the message is a genuine one or a spam. It will further analyze other characteristics that will allow it to assess the probability of classifying the message as either, spam or legitimate.

Bayesian Spam Filters – Adapting Automatically

Once you have classified the message, as shown above, it can be used to further train the spam filter. This is how it works. In the above scenario:

• If the message is analyzed as being spam, then the probability of the word ‘textile’ indicating legitimate mail is lessened.

• If the message is analyzed as being legitimate mail, then the probability of the words, ‘Nigeria’ or ‘lottery’ – whichever was used – needs to be re-analyzed and re-considered as spam.

The advantage of Bayesian filters is that they self adapt by learning from their own decisions, as well as the user’s decisions – if made manually. This automatic adaptability of the Bayesian anti spam filters is excellent for individual email users. Most spam emails have very similar and at times identical characteristics, whereas the characteristics of legitimate mails are different for each individual.

Author is admin and technical expert associated with development of computer security and performance enhancing software like Registry Cleaner, Anti Spyware, Window Cleaner and Anti Spam Filter. Learn how Anti Spam filter helps in securing online privacy. Visit our Home page or Resource center to read more about products and download free trial of a range of security and performance enhancing software like

• Windows Registry Cleaner
• Anti Spyware and Anti Adware
• Windows and Internet Cleaner
• Anti Spam Filter for MS Outlook
• Anti Spam Filter for Outlook Express

Author: Arvind Singh
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Canada duty tariff

Bayesian spam filtering has become a popular way to distinguish between legitimate emails and illegitimate spam emails, through a process that uses Bayesian statistical methods. It filters emails by classifying documents into categories. Based on the contents of the message in your email, these mail filters calculates the probability of the message being a spam. They are much more robust than the normal content based filters, and their anti spam approach hardly has false positives.

Normally when you receive an email, one look tells you whether the email is a spam or not. To your eyes, there is ‘zero’ probability of such mail looking like a good email. How would it be if spam filters, too, worked in the same way!

Bayesian Spam Filters

Bayesian filters for spam are what are known as scoring content-based spam filters. They try to work the way your eye does in identifying spam emails, by looking for words and other characteristics that typify spam. Every characteristic typical of spam is assigned a score, and the total spam score for the whole message is computed. Depending on the type of Bayesian filter you are using, it may also look for legitimate email characteristics, thereby lowering the total score.

The basic difference between the Bayesian spam filters and other simple scoring content based spam filters is that the Bayesian anti spam filters build the list themselves, as against other filters that depend on a manually built list of characteristics.

You start with a sizable bunch of emails you have identified as spam, and another bunch of good emails. The filters look at both, the legitimate and the spam emails and calculate in what probability various characters appear in them. Bayesian anti spam filters may look at:

• The words in the message body

• The headers (message paths and senders)
• The word pairs and phrases
• HTML code, such as colors
• Where a particular phrase appears (meta information)

The Problems With Scoring Content Based Filters

Though the scoring based spam filters work well, they also encounter certain problems; the normal ones more so than the Bayesian spam filters. These are some of the problems faced:

• The scoring content based spam filters build a list of characteristics from the spam emails and the good emails they get. For building a good list of spam characteristics, mail needs to be collected from hundreds of sources (email addresses). This may weaken the efficiency of the spam filters, as the characteristics of the good email would be different for each person.

• If the spammers make an effort to make their mails look like genuine mails, the filtering characteristics may have to be corrected manually – a very big effort.

Author is admin and technical expert associated with development of computer security and performance enhancing software like Registry Cleaner, Anti Spyware, Window Cleaner and Anti Spam Filter. Learn how Anti Spam filter helps in securing online privacy. Visit our Home page or Resource center to read more about products and download free trial of a range of security and performance enhancing software like

• Windows Registry Cleaner
• Anti Spyware and Anti Adware
• Windows and Internet Cleaner
• Anti Spam Filter for MS Outlook
• Anti Spam Filter for Outlook Express

Author: Arvind Singh
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Netbook, Tablets and Mobile Computing

Spam or unwanted / junk email is an attempt to force a message on recipients who often will choose not to receive it. It is flooding the Internet with commercial advertising on dubious products. Is anti spam software a solution to solve the problem?

Spam has become a worldwide problem and is expected to increase exponentially over the next few years, as regulations of spam through legislation have been mostly ineffective and slow. To put it in another way, we may say that the numbers of spamming methods have increased and improved over time and legislators have had a hard time to handle them. However, we can counteract this by installing an anti spam software in conjunction with an anti-virus software as well as internet security software into our computers. We can also learn how to fight against it at various anti-spam websites.

Anti spam software is a program that filters out spam email. It is an easy and powerful way to stop unwanted email. Most anti-spam software works at the network level, that is, protecting the user’s inbox from spam before it even reaches the computer. The anti-spam software uses fuzzy logic and filtering to analyze each email as it arrives and warns the user if it is suspected to be junk mail.

Most anti-spam software also allows the user to preview the unwanted mail before deleting them. The user is able to deal with it effectively before the mail gets to the computer.

Some anti spam software can even be programmed to adapt to the user’s personal preferences by learning the kind of email the user wants to receive. This intelligent software uses advanced learning filters to deliver an efficient approach in solving the problems of the user.

The unique up-to-date system of the anti-spam software ensures that the user is protected against the latest spam threats. This is a good way to stop mails with viruses or large unwanted attachments.

Most of the anti spam software is simple to install with easy to use steps so that the user do not have to waste too much time mastering it. It usually comes with a comprehensive guide, which normally includes some useful animated tutorial materials and frequently asked questions in the DVD software pack or the downloaded software. If you need further information before your purchase, check up the online help desk of the manufacturer.

The user is able to add the email addresses of business and, e-commerce associates as well as friends to a personalized list. Emails sent by them are always recognized when received. At the same time, the anti spam software uses another customizable list of blacklisted email senders to filter out their messages. As the unwanted email will be bounce back to the sender, he will think that the recipient’s email address is not valid and this may reduce future spam. It also allows the user to restore accidentally deleted emails.

In addition, most of the anti spam software runs well on the various operative systems such as Windows 95, 2000, NT and XP and is able to work with many existing email programs including Netscape and Microsoft Outlook.

Ske Chay of http://www.broadbandbusinesssolutions.com Providing some comprehensive information on Anti Spam Software at http://www.thesoftwarebank.com

Author: Ske Chay
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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What is a Spam Firewall?

A spam firewall is a hardware device that sits between your internet firewall and LAN. It is called a “firewall” because it provides data filtering of email packets, and blocks the packets that meet the criteria of “spam”. Spam firewalls can also provide anti-virus protection, anti-spyware, anti-spoofing and anti-phishing services, depending on the model you choose. A spam firewall is not designed to protect your network against intruders such as hackers – you will need a regular internet firewall for that.

How Does a Spam Firewall Appliance Work?

Spam firewalls use a variety of methods for determining what is considered spam and filtering it out. Normally a form of blacklisting is used, which automatically filters out email from known spammy addresses. A whitelist may also be used, which allows the administrator to identify addresses or domains that should never be blocked. Keyword scanning may also be used, allowing the administrator or individual user to block emails containing certain keywords or keyword combinations. A form of message authenticity checking is also normally used to identify valid “from” addresses, check details of the entire SMTP process, or validate legitimate IP addresses. Many spam firewall appliances also use bayesian algorithm filtering, which help the firewall block more spam over time as it “learns” what is considered spam based on message history, user input and other analysis. Incoming message flow filters also look at the number of incoming messages and where they are from, allowing them to quickly spot and stop a sudden barrage of spam emails that have been mass-distributed from the same source. Spam firewalls are very “smart” and good at eliminating the majority of spam email that comes into a network. They are not 100% effective, but many come close.

Are Spam Firewalls Expensive?

Spam firewall appliances range in price from around $2000 up to $20,000 or more, depending on the number of users it needs to protect and features. Many spam firewalls have optional features like antivirus or anti spyware. Spam firewalls need to be kept up to date with the latest data on known spam sites, new algorithms, updated filters, etc… This is normally handled by the firewall manufacturer as an auto-update feature. As with most network appliances, an annual maintenance plan is usually purchased for the purpose of keeping the firewall up to date and performing it’s best.

What About False Positives?

Spam firewall appliances use many sophisticated techniques to identify and block spam, generally with very good success. Because spammers are constantly change their techniques in order to get their junk mail past the latest and greatest spam filtering technologies, spam firewalls must continually monitor patterns and make filtering corrections. Spam firewall manufacturers are also constantly make corrective configuration changes to keep up with the battle against spammers. For this reason, even the best spam firewall is going to filter out “good” mail from time to time. This is called a “false positive”, and administrators (and users) must always be on the lookout for this. Most spam firewalls have sensitivity thresholds that can be adjusted by an administrator to help overcome false positives.

A spam firewall appliance is not your typical “set it and forget it” firewall, but the advantage of having such an appliance on your network far outweighs the need for some administrative work. If your organization experiences a lot of spam mail – get a spam firewall and experience the difference!

DJ is a corporate IT Manager and author of the following sites covering information technology topics: Computer Security for Everyone, Save on Phone Service with VoIP, Internet Phone Service – The Future is Here!

Author: Debbie Jacobsen
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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