Anti Spam Fanatics

I have read with amusement several articles lately which loudly proclaim things like "Anti Spam Fanatics are Ruining Your Business" or "Stop the evil anti-spammers!". These articles (and there have been several of them from multiple authors) state in no uncertain terms that spam filtering is evil because the marketer's newsletters are not being delivered to all of their recipients. 

This is not to say that these articles do not have a point. It's true that occasionally perfectly valid, double-opt-in (a method of subscribing which requires a confirmation of the subscription be acknowledged) newsletters have been blocked. In fact, this happens all of the time, with virtually every mailing. The block rate can be very high indeed if a newsletter happens to include some "spammy" words or phrases.

Okay, perhaps some background information would be useful. There are a huge number of spam filtering "solutions" available all over the internet. These range greatly in quality and complexity - everything from professional spam-killing packages which run on user's systems to filtering software on ISP servers to black hole lists which blacklist known spammers.

What's the problem with these spam solutions? Their methods of filtering are not perfect by any means. They often tend to harm the innocent as much as the guilty, blocking or blacklisting spammers and non-spammers alike in an effort to keep inboxes clean.

The basic issue is there is no solution for spam. Period. Nothing works well, no solution is perfect, and due to the design of internet email, nothing can ever work well. At least, not without some serious changes to the basic design of email.

That's what makes spam so frustrating to people - the fact that there is no real solution. I know that I received three to five hundred spam emails per day (before my filters strip most of the junk out), and it was very painful to try and work through that trash to find anything of value. The spammers are clever (as criminals often are); they fight back and change things around so that some of their messages get through no matter what you do.

A small group of people have decided that spam is unacceptable, and they have the presence of mind and high state of ethics to make their decision stick. They have created what is known as "blackhole lists".

What they've done is create systems whereby spammers are identified (by their TCP/IP addresses), cataloged and made available to anyone who desires to block spam. Their systems are, in my experience, incredibly accurate, almost trivial to use (from software) and relatively fast.

Other crusaders have created products of all shapes and flavors. Many are just simple filters, removing any email with certain words in the title, from specific email addresses or with the message text containing key phrases. More advanced products attempt to analyze each message to determine if it "looks like" spam. If so, the messages are deleted (or moved to a holding place for later review).

All of these solutions attempt to identify spam, and just as importantly, to automate, as fully as possible, this process. I know that I have spent much time trying to find anti-spam solutions, and one of my biggest criteria was to automatically destroy any incoming email that is spam. I personally don't want to spend any time at all dealing with sorting, searching, reviewing or configuring.

That's precisely what alarms the marketers, and it's exactly why they are writing so many articles about the "problem". They have found that their newsletters are being deleted by these highly automated systems well before they are seen by their subscribers. That's bad for their business (of course) and their fears are understandable.

The problem with their logic is, however, that spam has become a serious problem to most internet users, so serious, in fact, that many people are ceasing to use email entirely. In fact, I know of several people who have simply given up and no longer use the internet at all, precisely because of the problem of spam.

Thus, spam actually puts ALL email, all marketers and all newsletters at risk. 

I've been on a mission for several months now, attempting to solve the problem of spam. You see, my wife is on the internet constantly, all day long. Most of her time is spent working with email, and she became frustrated at the amount of spam she received. Most importantly, she did not want to receive the adult junk that seemed to wind up in her mailbox constantly.

Like any good husband, I want my wife to be happy, so I started working on finding a solution. I thought it would be simple, but I was wrong. What I learned is there is no real solution to spam. What I wanted was something which would delete the spam automatically without any intervention from me, yet allow the good stuff to get through.

Thus, I continued researching and put together a system which cuts down our spam from over 300 messages per day to less than one or two. I installed my own email server and took advantage of it's built-in spam filters (clumsy but useful). I then installed SpamDetective and used it's filters to cut down a few more messages. I installed a product called SpamFilter to check each message against the blackhole lists, then installed yet another filter to delete spam based upon a different algorithm. 

All of these solutions accept a "white list" of one form or another. These lists specify domain names and email addresses which are allowed to be received regardless of content, blacklisting or anything else. This is where all of the newsletters that my wife and I receive are specified.  Every time we sign up for a newsletter, it gets added, so that they always get through the filters.

I made sure all of these filters worked as desired, then set them up to run automatically. I examine nothing - if legitimate emails get deleted then so be it. Life is too short to worry about an email or two, and I'd rather not spend thirty minutes to an hour a day scanning a junk folder for one or two good messages.

The net result? My wife is happy. She gets several hundred good emails a day (sometimes over a thousand) and virtually no junk mail at all. I receive over three hundred emails myself, and only one or two is a spam message. Now that's progress.