| False Positives and Ignorance
Content inspection is a poor way to recognise spam, and the proliferation of image spam recently drums this home. However if one must use these unreliable techniques, one should bring mathematical rigour to the procedure. Tools like SpamAssassin combine content inspection results, with other tests, in order to tune rule-sets to give acceptable rates of false positives (mistaking genuine emails for spam), and thus end up assigning suitable weights to different content rules. If one is going to use these approaches to filtering spam, and some see it as inevitable, one better know one's statistics, or trust the folk who write SpamAssassin to have good default rules. Most people are not good at statistics, so guess what they do? The default rules in SpamAssassin carry a lot of weight in the world of spam.
Web-based mail is often the best for fighting spam
Q: I'd like to know if there's something I can do to limit the amount of junk e-mail I get in Outlook Express. Each day, I receive dozens of messages offering everything from cheap mortgages to Viagra. [Podcast: James Kim on Sub-$50 MP3 players and the next gen Slingboxes. Also, David Einstein on standalone DSL service. ] A: You probably can't completely eradicate junk mail (also known as spam), but you can do a reasonable job of keeping it in check. If you use Outlook Express, you can create a "blocked senders list" by going to Message Rules in the Tools menu. You also can get anti-spam software. Popular programs include SpamBully ($29.95 from spambully.com), iHateSpam ($19.95 from sunbelt-software.com) and Cloudmark Desktop ($39.95 from cloudmark.com). SpamBully may have the edge because it doesn't charge for annual subscriptions to updated filter lists.
Shipping company bets on Scalix
Global freight company Blue Strata Trading has picked Linux-based Scalix as the tool to provide its mail, calendaring and internet needs. The Scalix system, installed by local service provider Synaq, includes a mail server, spam control, mail server virus protection, blackberry connectivity, internet access and firewall administration. Hadley Van Lille, Blue Strata Trading chief information officer, said the company deals with "international suppliers and cannot afford to experience any downtime on any of these vital areas of the overall ICT infrastructure." Synaq also manages the Blue Strata's Linux servers which run the company's proprietary in-house management system. "We are yet to experience any downtime on this system," said Van Lille. Yossi Hasson, sales and marketing director at Synaq said that "being in the shipping and freighting business, Blue Strata relies heavily on email correspondence and therefore any platform implemented needed to be extremely reliable and stable.
Secure Computing Wages War Against Image Spam
"Image-based spam is a particularly difficult problem for a couple of reasons," noted Michael Osterman, founder and principal of Osterman Research. "It is much harder to detect with conventional spam-filtering and blocking technologies. Further, it is typically much larger than normal text-based spam, consuming much more bandwidth and storage." "Traditional anti-spam software depends on content filtering techniques such as keyword filtering and Bayesian analysis to detect spam. Even the technology used to recognize characters from images, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), is not effective on today's image spam," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief technology officer of Secure Computing. "Spammers are using advanced mathematical and graphical techniques like random modification of image pixels and dynamic construction of images from multiple components to bypass spam filtering tools." Secure Computing's TrustedSource(TM) Stops Image Spam Organizations cannot afford to depend solely on localized protection using algorithms that quickly become obsolete and cannot accurately filter new threats like image spam.
Microsoft to open up its e-mail technology to fight spammers
When the predecessor to the Internet, the ARPAanet, was being demonstrated to the public in 1972, it was considered to be a tool of interest mostly to scientists and researchers who wanted to collaborate on data. Only a year later, ARPA staff discovered that over three-quarters of network traffic was taken up by e-mail messages, an application that was not even thought of when the network was originally designed. E-mail quickly became the killer app of the Internet, and it didn't take long after that before spam became the number one aggravation of using e-mail. Now, Microsoft is proposing to help clean up the morass that e-mail has become, by announcing that they are opening up their specifications for their Sender ID e-mail framework under the Open Specification Promise (OSP). The move will make it possible for anyone to build e-mail systems that use Sender ID without a license, with an irrevocable promise under the OSP that Microsoft will not sue the implementer for any patent violations.
Virtual Appliance provides messaging security.
October 6, 2006 - Suited for enterprises that have adopted or are moving to VMware environment, Messaging Security Gateway(TM) Virtual Edition provides defense against message-borne threats including spam, viruses, intellectual property leakage, and breaches of customer and employee data. Modular architecture lets users deploy inbound or outbound email defenses as needed. Snapshots of entire environment can be taken and restored at any time leveraging VMware infrastructure management tools. .
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