Internet Content Filtering

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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As the flood of spam increases end users are looking for new and more efficient solutions to block spam. In turn software developers are knocking themselves out trying to come up with the killer app that will stop spam forever.

For several years now companies have been focusing on faster and smarter software to be installed on your PC or on your servers that will detect spam through increasingly more complex algorithms. The ingenuity behind these products can’t be argued with. The problem was that as the spam filters became better so did the quality of the bulk email software used by the spammers. The battle to fight spam was spiralling out of control.

There’s an old scientific principle called Occams Razor. It simply means that all things being equal the most simple solution is often the best one.

Somebody somewhere realized that there was a simple solution to the vast majority of spam. Spammers email millions of people each day. This is an automated process that they can’t possibly monitor manually. Enter challenge response spam email filtering.

When using a challenge response system each email address must be authorized to deliver email to you. You can either authorize these email addresses manually by adding them to your challenge response whitelist or the challenge response email server can take care of that for you.

The process is simple but incredibly efficient.

Spammer sends email

Challenge response email server doesn’t recognize address so issues a challenge email that must be phyiscally answered by a real human.

Challenge answer = yes = sender is authorized to send you email

Challenge answer = no = senders email address is added to blacklist and all future email from them is automatically blocked.

Challenge repsonse spam filters demand that a real person reply to the challenge email. Spammers who generate millions of emails a day simply don’t have the time to do this and are therefore blocked from sending you any future junk email.

Using a challenge response system initially can be extra work but after 30 days you’ll see a dramatic reduction in the amount of email you receive from spammers. Our challenge response system is currently showing 11,000 blocked pieces of spam in the last *5 months*. Those are hard figures to argue with.

About the Author

Niall Roche is the content author and owner of www.spam-site.com which reviews spam blocker software.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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In a word Bayesian spam filters are “intelligent”. Bayesian spam filters are intelligent in so far as they’re capable of comparing two sets of information and acting on the result. This is in direct contrast to the vast majority of other spam filters who use pre-built rules to decide which e-mail is spam and which is not.

Bayesian spam filters can take one group of legitimate e-mail and another group of spam and compare the values and data of each. The definition of legitimate e-mail that it creates at the end of this comparison session is what it uses going forward to scan your inbox for spam.

FYI Bayesian spam filters are named after Thomas Bayes an 18 century cleric who created something known as Bayes Theorem. In summary Bayes Theorem is as follows: ..”in statistical inference to update estimates of the probability that different hypotheses are true, based on observations and a knowledge of how likely those observations are, given each hypothesis.” In plain English it looks for obvious repeating patterns to form an “opinion” on something. In spam filter terms that “opinion” becomes a rule which keeps you spam free (or pretty close

The really neat thing about Bayesian filters is that they’re capable of learning. For example if they decided to block an e-mail because the filter perceived it as junk but the user marked it as valid mail the Bayesian filter then knows not to block that type of e-mail in the future. So, in time, this type of spam filter learns enough to block spam far more effectively. AOL have embraced this type of spam filter with the launch of AOL 9.0 and AOL Communicator- if the big dog wants it then it must be worthwhile?

So what Bayesian spam filtering options are available to you? Well quite a few to be honest and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by some of the names involved The first one on the list is AOL with their AOL Communicator product. The spam filtering features in AOL Communicator and AOL 9 are, to be honest, impressive. Think what you will of the provider themselves AOL Communicator is an excellent product and is suitable for use by both PC and Mac OSX users.

Next up we have Eudora. The nice folks at Qualcomm have designed an excellent e-mail client that also has built in Bayesian spam filtering. I’ve used Eudora in the past and it’s a neat little package. Again the benefits here are advanced integrated spam filtering with your e-mail automatically. Mac OSX and OS9 users are in luck with Eudora providing support for both.

If you’d like to know more about spam filters or just spam in general please do drop by http://www.spam-site.com for more information.

About the Author

Niall Roche is the content author and owner of www.spam-site.com which reviews and tests spam blockers.

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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The unsolicited junk or bulk email that you receive is known as Spam. Spam is a very serious problem the people have to deal with daily. Sometimes the junk emails exceed the regular email messages that we receive in our email account. Spam filter can be a solution for you to get freedom from Spam mails. There are different types of software to keep out the Spam emails from your inbox. Spam filters can monitor the emails that come in your inbox and prevent any Spam mail from entering in to your inbox.

The Spam email that you receive is due to the inappropriate usage of mailing list. The mailing list consists of email ids of different people and all of them can be flooded with bulk or junk emails. Many companies send out the Spam email massages to a large number of people who do not ask for such massages. Spamming is considered to be very bad netiquette as it amounts in violating a person’s privacy. Netiquette demand that no email id can be used without the user’s permission.

Many Spam filters are designed to help people who are constantly bombarded with junk or bulk mails. Spam filters make use of filtering technology to filter the contents of the incoming emails. Spam filters can effectively help a person by sorting out these types of incoming emails.

Different types of Spam filters can be helpful for controlling spam. Content based Spam filter is one type that can be used by you. The filter scans the content of the email, and searches for tell tale signs for Spam in the message. Content based Spam filters have however not been very effective in controlling the bulk or the junk messages. The main reason for this being that the spammers had devised ways and means by which they can communicate their message despite the presence of such filters.

Spam filters that are prepared these days are designed to give advanced protection against unsolicited emails and spammers. Bayesian filter technology is another effective way of controlling these mails. Bayesian technology is not like other filtering methods that search for Spam identifying words in the header and the subject line. The Bayesian filter uses the entire perspective of an email when it looks for characters or words for identifying a Spam. Another feature of Bayesian Spam filter is that the more it analyzes the incoming mails, the more it learns to identify Spam mails.

Spam mails can sometimes bombard you in such a manner that you may end up receiving more Spam than the regular emails. Most email service providers have Spam filter software enabled in their sites. All you need to do is select the options of setting the Spam filter for your emails according to your liking. You can mark the sites from which you want to receive or not receive mails in your inbox. Setting the options for blocking the bulk or the junk mails is entirely your prerogative.

About the author:

Author - MattGarrett http://www.free-spam-blockers.com

Learn How to Protect Your Family from the Worst of the Web!

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The Misconceptions of Spam Filters
by Laurie Rogers Copyright July 2002

Unfortunately there are a lot of people online that all have
many misconceptions regarding Spam Filters. Today I’m
going to answer some questions that people have asked
me about my “Spam column” for DEMC Small Business
Ezine regarding them. With regards to spam filters, one
can never have enough knowledge, so I do hope that this
article will clear up any misconceptions that you may have.

1. Don’t spam filters ONLY apply to those who have NOT
opted in?

This is indeed a very sad misconception, Spam Filters do
affect EVERYONE who sends and receives email in some
way or another. Whether you publish a FREE ezine OR a
PAID ezine, it does not matter, if it is being sent by email
it affects YOU. The biggest problem with filters is that they
have NO way to detect that the email message is in fact
“Optin”, they actually base it on your headers.

Should you use a third party list server, your chances of
being filtered are even greater, because of that reason.
And this is how ALL filtering is based: By looking at the
headers in your email message, by using a point system
based on the contents in your subject line as well as the
body.

This can also be done by subscribing to a blacklist service
that will provide them with a list of domains or hosts that
have been identified as being used by spammers -such as
http://www.spamhaus.org or http://mail-abuse.org/ AOL,
Verizon and Accessus are widely known for using services
such as these. It should also be known that spam filtering
programs MAY also subscribe to these services, some do
and some do not.

2. I heard that spam filters don’t apply to autoresponders,
is this true?

Actually they do, because if you send email using a third
party list server, and put your FROM email address in the
field rather than a FROM address on the third party’s list
server - the spam filter will read it as being a “falsified”
email address or header. Because REAL spammers do
it all of the time.

3. Spam Filters do not target HTML ezines because they
can’t read the code properly, is this true?

Yes in fact they do, some more so than text ezines, this is
because HTML ezines are considered to be more virus
prone. And NOT all list servers and email clients “clean”
their email before it is sent. Meaning, even if you do not
have a virus on your computer, your ezine can still pick
one up during the process of sending through your list
server. This has been known to happen on “high traffic”
list servers as well as FREE list servers, such as Yahoo
Groups.

3. Aren’t spam filters ONLY used by large ISP’s?

Although it is very true that the majority of larger ISP’s use
Spam Filters (such as: AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Mindspring,
Verizon, Accessus, Sympatico etc.) you will find a lot of
smaller ISP’s use them as well. For instance, my ISP has
only 900 customers and they do use them, although I’ve
made it quite clear they are unacceptable on my account.
The most “popular program’ that ISP’s use is called Spam
Assassin.

I hope this article has cleared up any misconceptions that
you may have had regarding Spam Filters. You can learn
more detailed information about Spam filters by visiting:
http://spamassassin.org ests.html

Article by Laurie Rogers Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

About the Author

Laurie Rogers is co-author of the Ezine Resource Guide, you
can check it out at: http://www.zineadz.com/erg.html She
is the owner of Optin Frenzy a list building program for ezine
publishers http://www.optinfrenzy.com You can also obtain
Laurie’s articles at: mailto:ezinearticles@optinfrenzy.com