Know Spam Better, Block Spam Better

According to wikipedia, spam is "the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages". Today spam is widely known in form of email, instant messaging, mobile phone messaging and internet forum while the most popular is email spam, also referred as junk e-mail.

Typically e-mail spam is sent in large number to numerous recipients. Spammers (people who send the spam message) often use false contact information such as name, address and phone. By doing this they set up disposable accounts at various Internet Service Provider (ISP) so that they can easily move quickly from one account to another as the ISPs discover and shutdown each one.

Many people are unhappy with spam email. You can't read thousand of messages every day, can you? In many cases you may delete it right away but since there are thousand of them, most likely your business mails are deleted inadvertently.

Spam email can also be used to flood a mail server, performs a denial of service (Dos) attack, makes the destination server freeze or suffer for low performance. If you are a mail administrator this can keep you busy the whole day. You may have to stop the mail service to allow you to clear all spam messages, start the service again just to find out that you have 3000-4000 new spam messages. Been there, done that!

Spam email is growing exponentially from time to time. Still according to wikipedia, in year 1987 there are about 600 spam emails, in 2005 the number increase to 30 billion per day. Right now in 2007 there are about 90 billion spam emails per day. If you ever have kind of "enlarge your penis bla bla bla" mail in your inbox, no doubt you have received spam.

There are however ways to prevent spam. Some of them are filtering e-mail based on its content, DNS-based blackhole lists, greylisting, spamtraps and many else. E-mail filter technique is one of the most popular, this is done by define what kind of word you believe it is spam. For example, if you set "viagra" then every e-mail that has "viagra" in it will be considered as spam and will be rejected or proceed to junk folder - you decide the action.

Another method is by block ip address or e-mail address known as spammers. By doing this is if an e-mail is coming from the blocked list your server will automatically reject it. Greylisting is a method where an e-mail will be temporarily reject if it comes from unrecognized sender. The logic is simple, if the mail is legitimate the recipient server will try to send it again (and this time the destination server will accept it) but if it is a spam, it will never be resend.

So what method is the best? Frankly speaking, nothing. A single method can't cover it all. You have to combine it. Using blocked list is easy but hard to maintain since you have to keep it up to date. Greylisting probably needs less administrative effort but it also means there's delay in delivering mail. If you can't have it all, you must pick up the best option for your need. Hey, don't be greedy.

Most of mail program such as MS Exchange and Squirrel have their own spam filter but you might want to add third party spam filter, because if you have high mail traffic your mail program will have to work double: send/receive and filtering spam. Believe me, mail scan is a heavy task.

Common people are more concern about virus because it costs them more than spam. Little do they know that spam can open the gate for virus. Spam can carry virus or link to sites that contain virus. Some anti virus software offers spam filter feature that may help you to decide. This is the best option if you have limited budget for both of them, beside why waste your money for two if you can have them in one?

Do you notice that spam can cause trouble more than you see? It can take your mail server down, keep you busy all day or consume extra space in your hard drive. Be smart, block spam before you have one!

Ricky is a DBA, system analyst and design as well as VB & C# developer. He had deep experience with manufacturing, attendance and apartment system for almost 10 years. Read his tips and trick in http://itdevcorner.blogspot.com

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