How To Make Spam Get Out of your Inbox?

How much time do you spend every day to delete spam or read them? Definitely a sizable amount of the precious productive time is spent on dealing with spam. Almost all internet users using emails and mailboxes encounter this problem. Spam usually carry advertisements or news irrelevant or unnecessary to you and most of all they land in your mailbox without your permission. This is enough cause for you to filter spam using specialized soft wares.

Many software development companies try consistently to block spam by inventing newer methods to filter spam. Both the spammers and the software professional fight parallel to one another. When the experts develop spam filters, the spammers use another method to introduce spam in different ways. It like the world war between the internet giants and like the real war one party fights for the good of the internet users when the other fights to destroy the internet. Who wins the battle is unpredictable as both win and lose simultaneously.

Anti spam software should be thus carefully chosen to filter spam and protect the working environment and save time. The nature of spam, the size of the work force and the capacity of the software to identify real spam from the important mails should be widely analyzed before ordering software. Home users can download free software to fight spam. But business concerns which work on various computers must have software which can delete spam even before it reaches the computers.

Anti appliance spam is also used to filter spam eve before it reaches the mail box. Whenever mail arrives it first passes through the software spam filter where it is scrutinized for authenticity. It is released to the mail box only if it proves to be real mail. Spam mails can come in different forms. It can also come with your friends email id. The spammers collect the most mailed ids through illegal means and send spam mail through them.

The worst part is many spam might prove to carry virus definition and when opened attack the users operating system deleting files and folder. The spam mails may also be Spyware implemented to hawk the users' private details. Whatever be the type of mail it is always wise to fight it before it becomes malicious to our working environment. Now after reading the above article, you must have got the idea of the fact that fighting spam is not an easy task but with little care and filter spam, you can achieve it.

Cost Of Spam

E-mail is now being abused. The flow of spam on the Internet is the proof. It is annoying to download hundreds of disgusting spam emails into the inbox looking for some legitimate messages. Not only you waste your valuable time to delete junk emails by hand, you also waste your money as each spam message in your inbox takes precious kilobytes of bandwidth you paid for. In addition, spam messages can contain viruses, which can infect your computer system, and hidden tracking codes, which work as soon as you click on the message and let the spammer know that your email address is valid. With all that said, it would be great to delete the messages that you don't want to receive beforehand and launch your email client to pull down only good emails. Anti-spam software can do this for you. It helps you fight against annoying spam.

There is a wide choice of anti-spam filters available on the Internet. The common services or features they offer are:

• Whitelist and Blacklist. The decision whether an email message is spam or good is taken based on the sender's email address. The whitelist contains "friendly" email addresses, and the blacklist contains potential spammers, or simply people you don't want to communicate with.

• Filtering based on the message subject or content. Some words or phrases are met in spam emails more often than others. These are usually vulgar or adult words (sometimes too offending). Thus, filtering based on a keyword is rather helpful.

• Virus scanning. There is possibility that spam email contains a virus in the attachment. Certain anti-spam programs allow you block emails with various suspicious attachments.

• Automatic spam detection. Some anti-spam filters can check inbound email and delete the emails they consider as spam automatically at a regular basis.

• Email recovering. Some spam blockers provide you with the ability to move spam emails to a quarantine folder and keep them for a fixed number of days. In addition, there is the possibility to recover an email from the trash if you need it.

So, with the great features and benefits that antispam software offers, you can now easily block the majority of spam emails.

Spam Control

Bayesian spam filters work by analyzing the contents of the email, and then calculating the probability of the message being spam. They analyze the characteristics of both, the legitimate mails as well as the spam mails. For the Bayesian spam filtering process, both, the characteristics of the legitimate mails as well as the spam mails are equally important. As it analyzes the mails, it keeps on building up a list of genuine as well as spam characteristics.

Once you have analyzed and classified the message as genuine or spam, it can be used to train the spam filters. Spammers would have a real bad time if spam filters can be specifically trained for individual users. They would have a hard time hoodwinking most people's spam filters, and the spam filters would have the ability to adapt to whatever the spammers would try.

What Can The Spammers Try

The only reason why an email is a spam is that it is significantly different from the regular and legitimate email. The spammers are likely to succeed and get past the Bayesian spam filters if they make their spam emails look identical to the ordinary mails everyone gets. They probably have the wherewithal to do it today. But spammers are not there to send ordinary looking emails, and the ordinary looking emails are the only way to get past the anti spam filters, such as the Bayesian spam filters.

Ordinary looking emails do not work for spammers as their aim is to make money. They send emails to hundreds of thousands of people and at a miniscule cost to them - and if only a fraction of the recipients respond, they have got it made. If they do decide to switch to ordinary looking mails to get past the Bayesian spam filters, we would be receiving much more spam in our inboxes every day, just as we used to before the Bayesian spam filters came into play. But it will not work for them - commercially.

There is one thing they can try, though, to get past the Bayesian spam filters. The basis of the Bayesian spam filters is that if one word appears very frequently in a legitimate mail, it is so significant that it can make any message appear to be genuine, even if it happens to be spam.

The spammers now need to find a way to find out those good email words to hit the bulls-eye. They can do this by using HTML return receipts to see the messages you opened, and can include one of them in the spam message to get it past the Bayesian spam filter. Such things are time consuming and HTML return receipts do not always work.

Windows Firewall

Windows Firewall is a personal firewall which comes bundled with Microsoft’s Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista operating systems. It filters data before it enters your system. Not only does Windows Firewall check incoming information; it takes care of outgoing information as well. A firewall that works with a router program probes every network packet to decide whether to forward it toward its address.

Windows Firewall protects the valuable data stored on your PC in following ways:

• Denying Remote Login.
• Preventing SMTP session hijacking.
• Scanning E-mail bombs that carry viruses and other malware.
• Not allowing suspicious Macros to run on PC.
• Keeping track of Virus, Spams and Trojans.
• Deleting / blocking risk ware.

Windows Firewall ensures an effective security of Microsoft Windows. It also prevents the malicious software from going out of the system followed by giving prompt to clean it. Computer viruses and hackers use open ports of a computer whose firewall security system is disabled. It leads to spread of virus in whole PC. Therefore, a firewall is essential security software on a computer.

Windows Firewall was first released onto Windows XP SP2. All kind of network connection including wired, wireless, VPN, or even FireWire, has the firewall enabled by default. However, there can be some built in exceptions allowing connections from machine on the local network.

Windows Vista has an improved version of the firewall which boasts of addressing concerns around the flexibility of Windows Firewall in a corporate environment.

Installing firewall security system offers an ultimate protection to network against outside intruders. Improper architecture or poor set up of firewall can affect data, thereby hampering your productivity. This encourages a need for to avail firewall support specifically focused on firewall protection.

Anti Spam Terbaru

Kalangan pebisnis menyatakan kalau dari seluruh komunikasi email global yang terjadi, hanya sekitar 15% yang masuk kategori email valid atau bukan spam; dan diprediksi jumlah email spam akan terus meningkat memasuki tahun 2008 ini. Ini masih diperkuat lagi oleh pernyataan Opus One – perusahaan penguji perangkat pengaman email, bahwa kebanyakan solusi proteksi email yang ada memiliki tingkat ’false positive’(error) rata-rata hingga 0.85%; atau bisa diasumsikan dalam setiap 120 email bisnis valid (bukan spam) ada 1 email yang tidak sampai ke penerima karena dianggap sebagai email spam.

Kalau mengutip laporan Ferris Research, setiap tahunnya perusahaan menghabiskan biaya sekitar US$3.5 milyar hanya untuk email-email yang hilang. Biaya itu belum seberapa kalau dibandingkan dengan hubungan bisnis yang berantakan hanya karena sebuah email yang hilang.

Bagaimana ’false positive’ ini dapat terjadi? Penyebanya karena kebanyakan dari perangkat anti-spam dirancang untuk bekerja untuk Bahasa Inggris! Hal inilah yang cenderung menyebabkan lebih banyak kesalahan pada email-email yang menggunakan bahasa-bahasa lain, seperti Cina, Thai, Korea, Arab, dan tentunya Bahasa Indonesia.

Saat ini di Indonesia, telah hadir solusi proteksi email: RealMail dari BoxSentry, yang menggabungkan teknik positive reputation data dan sender authentication untuk melindungi pengiriman email-email bukan spam. Untuk teknologi anti-spam, BoxSentry mengembangkannya bersama dengan eleven GmbH– perusahaan teknologi dari Eropa yang terkenal dengan mesin anti-spam-nya eXpurgate. Kombinasi keduanya mampu mengklarifikasi email-email secara cerdas; memungkinkan pemeriksaan email bukan spam yang cepat untuk diteruskan kepada penerimanya. Sehingga pebisnis terlindung dari email spam pada jaringan mereka, yang biasanya membawa masalah baru bagi perangkat komputer.

RealMail merupakan solusi proteksi email terbaru, yang memastikan infrastruktur komunikasi utama di perusahaan tetap handal, terlindung dan aman, serta dapat diperbaiki.

Di Indonesia, BoxSentry menjalin kemitraan dengan Informatika Solusi Bisnis (ISB) untuk kegiatan penjualan dan pemasaran.

Komitmen untuk Anti Spam

Para Clubber member IklanPromo.com, selamat atas keputusan anda untuk bergabung pada layanan Iklan Promo.Com media terkini untuk layanan iklan baris online Indonesia. Seiring dengan meningkatnya jumlah anggota dan traffik yang semakin hari semakin meingkat, perlu kami ingatkan untuk para member agar memperhatikan hal-hal sebagai berikut :

1. Mengingatkan kembali untuk para member untuk tidak memasang iklan yang sama secara berulang-ulang (spamming), karena hal ini akan sangat menggangu para member yang lain. ( lihat kembali aturan dan kondisi iklanpromo.com).

2. Menempatkan iklan sesuai dengan katagori yang telah ditetapkan yaitu satu iklan untuk satu katagori. Masukan untuk menambahkan katagori yang baru dapat anda informasikan kepada kami melalui email support@iklanpromo.com untuk selanjutnya kami pertimbangkan dan putuskan.

3. Keseriusan anda sebagai member iklanpromo.com dapat kami lihat dari keseriusan anda mencantumkan data diri anda/identitas diri anda, sehingga kami pun yakin anda akan menggunakan layanan "member" secara bertanggungjawab.

Mari kita sepakat untuk menjaga iklanpromo.com sebagai iklan baris online yang paling bersih thd aktivitas Spam di Indonesia dengan menyajikan layanan dan informasi iklan dari bisnis, produk dan jasa yang bermutu sehingga pengunjung dapat menikmati informasi secara tepat dan benar. Untuk itu kami mohon partisipasi para member dengan ihklas dapat melaporkan kepada kami apabila diketahui ada iklan terpasang tidak pada tempatnya atau bertentangan dgn peraturan dan norma-norma kesusilaan di masyarakat. Kami tidak akan segan-segan me-non aktifkan para member yang melanggar hal- hal tersebut diatas.

Anti Spam SMTP Proxy (ASSP) @ UI

Ya, Universitas Indonesia menggunakan ASSP. Sebuah software berlisensi Open Source yang cukup mantap dan to-the-point. Beberapa teknologi anti spam sudah berulang kali dicoba namun sepertinya teknologi lain baik itu berbayar maupun berlisensi Open Source yang dicoba masih menggunakan konsep lama, yaitu content base dan sender reputation. Mengapa teknologi tersebut tidak bisa di rasa cocok ? Karena secara sederhana, spam juga dapat mudah dibasmi dengan 3 metode sederhana (ini dikutip dari website ASSP):

• Most spam has an invalid bounce address, so notifying non-delivery simply bounces to Postmaster, creating even more wasted bandwidth. Failing to notify non-delivery is a problem for false-positives. The SMTP server is the only place where spam can be stopped before entering your system.
• The only possible feedback for spammers to void an address is from the SMTP server.
• Spam that passes through your SMTP server into mailboxes incurs cost to your organization: storage, transmission, backup, deletion — in all these ways spam costs you money. The only way to minimize cost is to reject it at the initial point.

Bagaimanapun juga, teknologi MTA (sistem mail exchange) terlalu lambat untuk bisa beradopsi dengan teknologi baru spam, dimana pada spammer terkenal sangat agresif & cepat dalam melakukan adaptasi teknologi MTA. Akibatnya kebanyakan SMTP server kurang cepat dipersenjatai alat-alat penghalau spam.

Mengadopsi kelemahan dunia MTA dalam menyusul teknologi spam, maka jalan tengahnya adalah digunakan sebuah SMTP proxy yang listen at port 25 dan meneruskan ke MTA (yang bodoh) sebagai mail queue saja, dengan demikian SMTP server diimplementasi dalam arsitektur sistem sebagai sistem pada second layer.