Spam, E-mail, and Filters

We all live with spam. It is a fact of Internet life that with­out seri­ous spam fil­ters, we would be over­whelmed by spam. Some sta­tis­tics say that spam accounts for as much as 90% of all e-mail sent today. I don’t under­stand why spam works, and it must, oth­er­wise it wouldn’t be so preva­lent. Folks, the num­ber one rule about spam is don’t click, don’t respond, just throw it away. If nobody responded, there would be no spam! Fortunately, there are good fil­ters out there, some of which work much bet­ter than others.

I was reminded about this over the week­end when an old e-mail address that I have had since 1995 sud­denly had its Postini mail fil­ter removed because the ISP that hosted my e-mail until recently hadn’t paid their bill.  I was get­ting around 500 spam an hour, com­pared to 2–3 real e-mails that still came to that old address. Obscene!  I had the e-mail address shut off as the sim­ple solu­tion despite the fact I didn’t really want to loose it. 

I could have lived with it. I use an excel­lent Bayesian spam fil­ter with Apple Mail called SpamSieve. It works with most major Mac e-mail clients includ­ing Microsoft Entourage and Mozilla Thunderbird and despite the seri­ous num­ber of spams flood­ing my inbox, most were actu­ally imme­di­ately moved to the Spam folder so my Inbox stayed rather empty — I am a firm believer in a zero mail in my Inbox time man­age­ment pol­icy.  I just didn’t want to have all my band­width wasted by a bunch of junk mail.

I really like Postini (now owned by Google) and believe it is one of the best tools an ISP can use to reduce the amount of data flow­ing into their mail server.  There are a lot of great anti-spam tools an ISP can use includ­ing Baracuda, SpamAssassin, etc that the ISP can have and stop spam before it reaches their users but Postini stops it before it ever gets to the ISP and that is well worth the cost of Postini.  I don’t get a lot of traf­fic going to my mail server so I have SpamAssassin in con­junc­tion with a greylist­ing tool and ClamAV to keep most spam and viruses away from me at my new e-mail addresses. The greylist­ing tool is great for keep­ing traf­fic at a min­i­mal level since most spam­mers don’t get a chance to actu­ally send the spam. It is an advan­tage of hav­ing my own mail server (there are sev­eral down­sides too, I don’t rec­om­mend any business 

Other tools one can use include the built in anti-spam tools built into many e-mail clients. Mozilla Thunderbird has pretty good fil­ters built in. You can also buy or down­load other fil­ters sim­i­lar to SpamSieve for all oper­at­ing sys­tems. Linux peo­ple often incor­po­rate SpamAssassin on their work­sta­tion.  A quick search on www.download.com pro­duced a ton of anti-spam fil­ters, some free. SpamSieve is $30 and is well worth the cost. Some of the newer Internet secu­rity tools from com­pa­nies such as Symantec, McAfee, and Grisoft have work­able anti-spam tools as well.  Unfortunately, you still have to down­load all that spam to your e-mail client before it can be fil­tered and that is what I find unacceptable.

For many, if your ISP doesn’t pro­vide at least rudi­men­tary anti-spam fil­ter­ing, the best solu­tion is to get a Gmail account at Google. Google has great spam fil­ter­ing. Yahoo and AOL do as well but I haven’t used my Yahoo or AOL e-mail accounts that much so can not say from per­sonal expe­ri­ence how good they are. 

Businesses can get Gmail plus a whole bunch more in Google Apps for all their employ­ees in their own domain for rel­a­tive inex­pen­sive annual fees. Again, this keeps the nas­ties off of the busi­ness’ local net­work and leaves it up to Google to deal with. Yahoo has sim­i­lar (and some say even bet­ter) ser­vices for busi­nesses. It appears that Google also can offer Postini directly to busi­nesses as well so that is an excel­lent option as well.