Spam – not a minor nuisance

Spam has many definitions and can come in many forms, shapes and sizes. In some cases one person's spam is another person's treasure (and in some cases business).The two main places I encounter spam is in my e-mail or at the message boards that I frequent. I can sum up my feelings for spam in one word, annoying. So guess what? I'm sick of it and I just need to vent.

Spam is no longer considered as an ignorable problem. It's increasing rapidly and becomes the unwanted part of your life even before you realize. Companies have started realizing about spam effective their performance in a big way and creating a hole into the organization cash box. It’s estimated that in India, organizations are spending Rs. 1000-2000 per person to curb the spam but all in vain and no significant relief achieved using normal filtering antispam products. The frustration levels in the organizations are high and productivity is getting affected badly. Organizations are suffering huge loss because of spam attacks and unwanted traffic getting into their network. Privacy is compromised which is forcing email users to change their email address and sometimes loose important email communication too.

The estimates of SPAM volume in the United States and India vary greatly, but no one argues that it is a major problem. Recent studies show that as much as 90% of all E-Mail messages traversing the Internet are classified as SPAM. This means that not only SPAM is a nuisance, but it also impedes the functionality of your E-Mail systems and cost money to handle. Space is used on E-Mail servers, processor time is consumed handling the great volume of SPAM, administrator time is taken up dealing with SPAM problems, and employee performance is eroded by sorting and deleting unwanted messages.

My friend expected his Hotmail and Gmail accounts to receive junk mail because of all the stories he kept on listening but he didn't realize that there would be so much trouble because of it, it just keeps on coming. It's so bad that he received the same spam email 3 times over in the space of a week despite his attempts to block it using the junk mail filters. It just does not seem to stop because I feel that sender never gets the 'failure to deliver message' from hotmail or gmail. Not to mention that he lost few important emails while dealing with such a large pool of spam.

Here's a word of warning from me, don't submit your email for Free banner share or news, unless you want 60 pieces of spam in your e-mail on a daily basis for about three weeks (stop laughing and looking at me like this, I only did it once few years ago). Good thing that e-mail address was web based and free because I was forced to close it down and stop using it.

Players like Bright mail, Microsoft, Google and Symantec still relies on content filtering based technique and tries to identify the spam based on scoring of content. Bayesian Filtering, Blacklists, Keyword/Phrase matching, ReverseDNS, Rogue Methods (no of rcpt. etc) are some techniques used by major antispam products. I have experienced that getting rid of spam cannot be achieved by just installing a software product on pc or server, but the product must allow you to use multiple ways to trap spam and implement an antispam policy. This software product is to eliminate spam at gateway level itself.

I say this because every organization is different and so as every email user. For Example - The email received from a job site to me is spam but for a job seeker it may be otherwise and there may be many examples like this, hence I have also felt the need of some kind of user level control for stopping spam and good antispam must provide control to the end user along with administrator.

Let me share another true case. I receive requests from companies to try the trial version of SpamJadoo or offer me opportunities that sound very legit. The problem is that at first glance the message may look a little bit suspicious but turns out not to be, which in turn can cause the old ignores and deletes action. When that is done it could mean that I have missed a good opportunity and business loss that could have benefited me.

The major problem is that I'm not the only person who does this and apparently, it's done on a very large scale. This results in innocent e-mails and newsletters getting caught in the crossfire.

Unfortunately, We have no single software product today for this matter, spam is here to stay and if one spammer goes down then 50 others come in and take their place. You can use anti-spam programs/services, but in the end they are not the total solution because they are not 100% effective but if you decide the antispam strategy and implement through a intelligent product like SpamJadoo, you have a chance to survive from spam, otherwise, the only thing you can do is not to send any spam yourself and hope others have the same email ethics to follow.

Author : Dr. Ajay Data
e-mail : akd.web@dil.in