Free Spam Blocker
Spam blocker services
Free Spam Blocker A new service and software from MessageLabs
Ltd. and Sunbelt Software Inc., respectively, look to stem the rising
tide of unsolicited bulk e-mail. (See amount of spam received per user
in the United States.)
MessageLabs is taking the tricks it learned scanning e-mail for viruses
and putting it to use scanning e-mail for the unwanted mass mailings
called spam. This week, the Minneapolis company will introduce SkyScan
AS (Anti-Spam), a service that routes corporate e-mail through four
scanners that tag and segregate suspected spam messages before
forwarding them to the addressed recipients.
Separately, Sunbelt is readying upgrades to its IHateSpam client-based
spam filtering software, which shipped earlier this month, that will add
more network administrator controls.
MessageLabs' service goes beyond typical filters, which simply compare
the sender's return address with a "black list" of spammers. SkyScan AS
also uses the heuristic scanner from the company's anti-virus software
and applies rules to every incoming e-mail to see if it has one or more
of the 550 characteristics associated with spam.
Those characteristics might include such things as malformed headers,
the word "adult" followed by a URL or white space following a # sign in
the subject line, officials said. Before an e-mail is tagged as spam, it
has to have several of the characteristics. SkyScan AS also learns from
experience and has a self-tuning component, MessageLabs officials said.
When messages are diverted through the company's 22 filtering sites,
delivery is delayed about 1.2 seconds, the officials said.
Steve Paskach, vice president of IT at Quadion Corp., sees spam as an
increasing time waster for Quadion employees. After receiving complaints
about pornographic spam, Paskach also sees it as a possible legal
liability.
"It's a growing problem," said Paskach, in Minneapolis. "The amount we
are getting is 70 to 100 a day per person for some people. That's a
problem from a lost-productivity perspective."
Quadion is beta testing MessageLabs' SkyScan AS. Paskach is willing to
let the system flag a couple of e-mail messages that aren't spam if it
rids him of the real thing.
"Even if we stop one or two appropriate e-mails, then that is going to
have to be the price to pay," Paskach said.
Sunbelt, of Clearwater, Fla., takes a different approach. Its IHateSpam
software acts as an add-on to individual Microsoft Corp. Outlook and
Outlook Express e-mail clients.
Sunbelt last week added a feature designed to increase the software's
accuracy. Users can hit the Is Spam button to forward instances of
unsolicited bulk e-mail to Sunbelt's Learning Network Server, where the
e-mail is analyzed to see if new filtering rules need to be added to the
software. Whenever the program is booted up, it sends a query over the
Internet to Sunbelt to see if new filter rules are available.
For the latest information about
spam
Microsoft Blocks Spammers
Microsoft helped snare a pair of Florida spammers, the company announced
Monday, as the Florida attorney general charged two men with running
scams that enticed people to fraudulent pharmaceutical and cigarette
sites.
Attorney General' Charlie Christ's office filed suit against Tampa
residents Scott Filary, 25, and Donald Townsend, 34, accusing both of
sending more than 65,000 illegal
spams during the past year. If
found guilty, the pair could face fines of up to $24 million under
Florida's anti-spam law, which taps spammers $500 for each illegal
message they send to Florida residents.
The suit is the result of a six-month investigation by Christ's office
as well as by Microsoft, the latter through honeypot-style accounts on
its Hotmail Web-based e-mail service.
Previously, the Redmond, Wash.-based developer has worked with attorneys
general to nail spammers in states ranging from New York to Texas.
"We're convinced that strong actions like those being taken today by the
Florida attorney general will help make illegal spam a thing of the
past," said Nancy Anderson, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, in a
statement.
An analyst from a third-part security firm agreed. "The message from the
Florida Attorney General's office is fairly clear," said Gregg Mastora,
a senior security analyst with U.K.-based Sophos, in a statement. "This
action will certainly make other spammers who aim to defraud think
twice."
For the latest information about
Block Spam at the Source
Who uses spam?
Many different types of organizations use
spam as a vital
part of the work. A sampling of these include:
-
Marketing:
finding groups of customers with similar behavior given a large
database of customer data containing their properties and past
buying records;
-
Biology:
classification of plants and animals given their features;
-
Libraries:
book ordering;
-
Insurance:
identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a high
average claim cost; identifying frauds;
-
City-planning:
identifying groups of houses according to their house type,
value and geographical location;
-
Earthquake
studies: spam observed earthquake epicenters to
identify dangerous zones;
-
WWW:
document classification; spam weblog data to discover
groups of similar access patterns.
For the latest information about
Free Spam Blocker
