It kills productivity. It wears out the unsuspecting DELETE keys on end users’ keyboards. It’s a source of annoyance and fury. We’re talking about junk email, dubbed by the Internet community as spam (not to be confused with the delicious canned meat product from Hormel).

It seems that once your email address gets out, spam starts to pour in. And it’s easy for an email address to fall into the hands of spammers. Filling out an online form is a great way to cause your email to end up on a spam list. Posting to the Usenet, or even displaying a link to your email address on a web site, leaves the address vulnerable to spider programs that roam the ‘Net looking for working email addresses. And lists are traded among direct email marketers (the nice name for spammers), so once you make one list, your spam intake will grow and grow. You, and your clients, will be inundated with ads for Viagra alternatives, foreclosed home listings, “free” credit reports, dating services, penile enlargement patches and pills, pleas from third world dictators to help them smuggle money out of their fallen regimes, and much, much more.

Left unchecked, spam can clog inboxes all over clients’ computer networks. Users will be forced to sift through mountains of junk email to find legitimate correspondence. Throughout the day, end users will be interrupted by new mail notifications, causing a break in concentration when they click over to check out the new message. When it turns out to be spam, the user must click back to whatever he or she was doing and get back into the swing. Hence, spam not only saps productivity when users are digging through their inboxes, but it also blows users’ concentration consistently throughout the day.
Your clients don’t have to put up with this. Spam control is a burgeoning cottage industry, with AOL, Microsoft, Network Associates, Symantec, and other companies advancing anti-spam technology. There are both client-side and the server-side solutions to the spam problem. Just don’t look to the government for help…

Legislation is Failing
Although the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) became law a few months ago, there hasn’t been a noticeable drop in the proliferation of junk email. Signed by President Bush on December 16, 2003 and effective as of January 1, 2004, the law has done little or nothing to curtail the amount of spam, some of it pornographic, landing in inboxes across the nation. The CAN-SPAM law, it’s being said, is close to impossible to enforce. It’s even been criticized for not only being ineffective, but for curtailing the possibility of more effective state legislation.
In short, laws notwithstanding, spam is here to stay. The government is failing, so it’s up to your clients to do something about their own spam problems.

About Anti-Spam Technology
The goals of a good anti-spam application are twofold: it should catch as much spam as possible and re-rout it to a different location, such as a “quarantine” folder, for later examination and deletion. At the same time, it must be careful not to quarantine legitimate email messages—when it does, it’s called a false-positive.
Spam filtering software uses several different techniques to trap unsavory email and keep it from landing in your clients’ inbox. They can use complex messaging rules to look for patterns and buzzwords in the message headers, subject and contents, flagging email matching certain credentials. They can also filter out email from addresses that are known origins of spam.
Anti-spam products allow users and administrators to tweak their settings for optimal spam detection and a minimum of false-positives. Most support the use of blacklists (configurable lists of email addresses from which not to accept email) and whitelists (configurable lists from which to always allow email to come through).
At first, it’s always necessary to sift through a new spam blocker’s quarantine folder to make sure it hasn’t discarded any email the user actually wants. Gradually, this will become less and less necessary, both through deft use of black- and whitelists and also because commercial anti-spam packages can be trained to recognize a particular user’s patterns.

In enterprise situations, spam can be fought at the server side, although there are few retail products available in that arena—most program developers publish their own applications and work directly with clients, shutting resellers out of the equation. Spam can also be fought at the client side by end users or SOHO/home users through retail applications like McAfee SpamKiller 2004 5.0, Norton AntiSpam 2004, and PC-Cillin Internet Security 2004.
With its latest client and server side software, Microsoft has introduced anti-spam capabilities. Both Microsoft Outlook 2003 (available with Microsoft Office 2003) and Exchange 2003 offer rich, built-in anti-spam capabilities. While this alone might not be enough of an incentive to entice clients to upgrade, it’s certainly a bullet-point worth a mention.

Anti-Spam Software
McAfee SpamKiller 2004 V.5.0 SpamKiller is a client-side anti-spam tool that runs in the background and automatically weeds through incoming mail and weeds out the spam. A multi-layered filtering engine not only blocks unwanted email in English, but it casts out foreign language spam as well. An Enable Friends List acts as a whitelists, ensuring that email from specific individuals you deem appropriate gets through. A new feature allows SpamKiller to filter mail for multiple email accounts, making SpamKiller ideal for family environments in which several users share the same computer. Tight integration with Windows XP and 2000 allows parents to control access to the quarantine folder, where any pornographic spam might end up.
As spammers are known for their ingenuity, SpamKiller can be updated to counter new methods that spammers might come up with during the life of the product. SpamKiller even gives users the power to report spammers to the proper authorities, and to bounce email back to the spammer which sometimes causes the user’s email address to be removed from the spammer’s list. SpamKiller works with most email readers, including Outlook Express 6.0 and various versions of Outlook.

Norton AntiSpam 2004
By integrating with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Eudora, Norton AntiSpam 2004 works to eliminate a dominant percentage of unwanted email messages from a user’s inbox. It tags unwanted email by adding the word spam to the subject line. It also creates a Spam folder, to which it routes all offending email. A powerful Allowed List (basically, a whitelist), ensures that email from family and friends won’t get tagged as spam. Furthermore, a configuration wizard makes it simple to import the user’s address book into the Allowed List. The winner of CNET’s Editor’s Choice award, AntiSpam flaunts ease of use and a thorough spam filter.
AntiSpam is trainable, allowing it to learn over time which emails stay and which get tossed aside. With training, its accuracy improves: less spam makes it through the filter, and fewer false-positives occur. It intelligently learns by analyzing the user’s outgoing email messages.
Like other Norton products, AntiSpam includes LiveUpdate to keep it ready to fight off the latest techniques that crafty spammers concoct. LiveUpdate can be automatic, to run in the background completely transparent to the user.

PC-cillin 2004 Internet Security
Trend Micro’s PC-cillin Internet Security 2004 includes a spam filter among its other capabilities. PC-cillin includes a firewall, antivirus software, parental controls, and spyware protection in addition to its anti-spam module. PC-cillin allows users to set its spam control to High, Medium or Low.

Outlook 2003
Perhaps one of the best reasons to upgrade to Office 2003 is because its email/calendar/PIM, Outlook, is fitted with a very useful spam filter. Earlier versions of Outlook relied on third party applications to take care of the spam problem, but, as is Microsoft’s style, the company included the handy new feature in the latest version of the ubiquitous Office suite.
A whitelist allows you to add senders whom you don’t wish to be blocked, and a blacklist allows you to add addresses from which you’d rather not receive email. However, Outlook 2003’s spam filter doesn’t try to learn from you manually tagging messages as “spam” or “not spam” as many third party products do; instead, Outlook provides two levels, low and high, and emails that come in are examined closely to see if they match certain characteristics of spam. With they hit a level, depending on whether you’ve set it to low or high, they’re tossed aside. Outlook 2003 returns a remarkably small percentage of false-positives.

Exchange 2003
Microsoft’s email suite includes a powerful spam filter that prevents end-users from having to sift through spam, or even to run client-side anti-spam programs of their own. Exchange 2003 keeps a list of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of known spam sources called Real-Time Block Lists, which runs as a service. As Microsoft’s Web site puts it, “Exchange 2003 sends the IP address of each incoming Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connection to the Real-Time Block List service provider, which returns a status code back to the server running Exchange. Depending upon the returned status code and the administrative configuration, Exchange might not accept the e-mail message and sends the appropriate error code back to the sender. Exchange 2003 enables multiple Real-Time Block List providers to be configured.”
Administrators can configure global whitelists and blacklists.
With Exchange 2003 running its anti-spam engine in the background, spam
protection is transparent to users—and that’s the way it should be.