Anti-spam Software

Anti-spam Software – June 2008

Email is a powerful communication medium, but can be compromised by spam making you sort through your inbox with one finger on the delete key while you purge this unwanted intrusion.  Worse yet, important messages may be inadvertently deleted or not given immediate attention.  In this article we will discuss anti-spam software that will help you gain control of your inbox.

There are three classes of anti-spam software that are differentiated by how they identify unwanted email.

The first class of anti-spam software identifies spam by the content of the email including the body, subject and from address.  Some products will analyze the content of the email you send to learn your lingo and accordingly adjust what it considers spam.  Another common feature allows the user to override a spam designation allowing the software to learn from its mistakes.  Most products allow you to whitelist contacts that you never want to block.

The problem with this type of filtering is that the spammers are usually one step ahead of the software using new techniques to disguise unwanted email.  Even worse is the potential for valid emails to be marked as spam.

The second type of anti-spam software only allows whitelisted senders to get through.  Most products have a feature that adds your address book to the whitelist.  Anyone sending email that is not on the whitelist will receive a challenge such as a confirming email to allow their inclusion on the whitelist.  If the challenge is not answered, the email will be treated as spam.

The most effective scheme involves a community-based system in which members mark incoming email as spam.  If enough people mark a message as spam, it will no longer be delivered to anyone’s inbox.  Multiple users must mark the message before it is considered spam and a built-in, user-trust rating system prevents abuse from spammers.  Messages not marked as spam by the community are delivered to your inbox.  Email messages sent to one recipient will never be blocked because the intended recipient is the only one that will receive the message.  Your participation in marking spam is strictly voluntary, so the time you spend is up to you.

Two community-based products are Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft Outlook by Cloudmark Inc. and iHateSpam 5.0 by Sunbelt Software.  Both products support POP3, webmail that supports POP3, IMAP and Exchange.   iHateSpam only supports Outlook as a client where as Cloudmark Desktop has a version for Outlook Express and Thunderbird as well as Outlook.  Both products use the same community of over one million users.  Cloudmark Desktop costs about $40 and iHateSpam is about half that amount, so if you use Outlook as your client you can save money with iHateSpam.

Note: When we tested Cloudmark Destktop 5.3.3 we encountered problems with the Google-Outlook calendar link.  Users of this link should talk to Steve before using this product.