Spam Tool
Spam blocker tool
Spam Tool As e-mail becomes an ever more indispensable tool for
companies and consumers, the scourge of
spam continues to grow
exponentially. The junk e-mail problem has evolved into such a stain on
Internet communications that the nation's largest Internet service
providers and technology companies are devoting unprecedented resources
to try to stop it.
Yahoo! Inc. is the latest company to wade deeper into the melee,
following tech titans like Microsoft , America Online and EarthLink .
While Yahoo and top ISPs have already been working together to squelch
spam, Yahoo on Friday detailed its own plan, which includes an assault
on messages that adopt e-mail header information to make it look like an
e-mail has come from someone else (This, as the techies know, is called
"spoofing."). The so-called DomainKeys software, which the company
"hopes to launch in 2004, will be made available freely to the
developers of the Web's major open-source e-mail software and systems,"
Reuters said.
The wire service explained how the spam scrubber would work: "Under
Yahoo's new architecture, a system sending an e-mail message would embed
a secure, private key in a message header. The receiving system would
check the Internet's Domain Name System for the public key registered to
the sending domain. If the public key is able to decrypt the private key
embedded in the message, then the e-mail is considered authentic and can
be delivered. If not, then the message is assumed not to be an authentic
one from the sender and is blocked," Reuters said. Brad Garlinghouse ,
vice president for communication products at Yahoo, told the wire
service: "If we can get only a small percentage of the industry to buy
in, we think it can have a dent."
Garlinghouse had a different estimate for IDG News Service, which
reported him as saying that DomainKeys will require "widespread
adoption" from industry to be effective. The IDG article said that
"legitimate organization that doesn't use DomainKeys will be unable to
embed the private-key validation in its outgoing messages, leading these
messages to fail the validation test at recipient systems that do use
DomainKeys. ... This is a big challenge for DomainKeys' success, said
Jonathan Gaw , an IDC analyst. 'They'll have to convince a lot of people
to cooperate with them,' he said. 'It's going to take a lot of effort on
Yahoo's part to get everybody on board.' Achieving that type of
consensus from people who run mail servers around the world will be
difficult, especially at companies that may fail to see what value this
has for them, he said." * Reuters via USA Today: Yahoo Proposes New
Internet Anti-Spam Structure * IDG News Service: Yahoo Pitching Antispam
Initiative to Industry
Spam Law Enforcement = Nightmare
As Yahoo ramps up its private push, governments worldwide grapple with
legislation to stem the tide of junk mail.
The European Union passed a law, which went live Oct. 31, to ban spam,
but it has already hit roadblocks. The EU "has asked nine member nations
that have failed to adopt a privacy law intended to help the fight
against unwanted email to describe how they intend to comply with the
law. Belgium , Germany , Greece , Finland , France , Luxembourg , the
Netherlands , Portugal , and Sweden must provide the explanation within
two months of face possible court action," The Associated Press said on
Friday. "The law aims to reduce internet fraud and protect legitimate
businesses by banning companies from sending unsolicited email, plucking
personal data from web sites or pinpointing the locations of
satellite-linked mobile phone users," the article reported. Erkki
Liikanen , commissioner for enterprise and the information society, told
The AP: "It is urgent that member states adopt a consistent legislative
approach to such issues," Liikanen said. "This will strengthen consumer
confidence in e-commerce and electronic services." * The Associated
Press via Australian IT: EU Presses For Spam Laws * EU's spam law,
included in regulatory framework for e-communications infrastructure
The EU's anti-spam law has a U.S. cousin. But like the EU's effort, the
federal Can Spam Act of 2003 could be too good to be true. Trying to
actually enforce anti-spam legislation could spell the death of various
spam-fighting efforts. "Eradicating spam is a top priority for the
American government too. The Can Spam Act made comfortable progress
through Congress this week, the first piece of federal legislation to
attempt to reduce the amount of unsolicited electronic garbage passing
over the internet. Opinion is divided as to how effective the new law
will be. But if it works at all, it will also help to improve internet
security. Spam is often the transmitter of computer viruses," The
Economist wrote on Nov. 27. * The Economist: Fighting The Worms of Mass
Destruction (Article is from Nov. 27)
The Seattle Times columnist Charles Bermant noted on Saturday that the
anti-spam law is slated to be "pushed through the sausage machine that
is our federal government this week." More from the article: "The bill,
due for consideration when Congress tackles this session's home stretch,
is often criticized as more of a public-relations move than an effective
way to get rid of the scourge. There are those who suggest the bill is
all style and no substance, that it is only a cynical play for voter
support. Consider the numbers: The House voted 392-5 in favor of the
bill and sent it to the Senate , which made some revisions and passed it
back to the house with a 97-0 vote. (One of the first calls I'll make
when they come back into session is to the five House holdouts and the
Senate absentees, to see what they were thinking)," he wrote. "Reading
the bill can make your head hurt. Not because it is necessarily wrong or
misguided, but in general, it really doesn't have a chance to make a
difference. Spammers are sly monsters who can turn on a technology dime.
Take a requirement for senders to include a working opt-out feature. The
trouble here is that most people believe replying to spam causes it to
multiply -- and who knows how spammers will try to deal with it. Still,
it might work if the government manages to prosecute the most egregious
offenders. * The Seattle Times: 'Lip Service Bill' Against Spam May
Alter Perceptions At Least
Research firm Gartner last week issued a report on the legislation. The
skinny? Researchers there don't think the law will control the spam
problem for companies and could instead make it worse. "Enterprises
should not expect federal legislation to solve their inbound spam
filtering problem. CANSPAM will likely not change spammer behavior.
However, it will cause increased scrutiny of all e-mail. Enterprise spam
protection lies in good e-mail management processes and the judicious
use of spamfiltering technology," Gartner wrote.
E-Tailers Change With Times
Online direct marketers continue to worry that their messages are
getting lost in the spam shuffle, so they've adjusted their practices,
The New York Times wrote last week. "E-mail is everything a direct
marketer could want - fast, flexible and, most of all, cheap. It is, in
fact, far too cheap. That makes it possible for marketers of all sorts
to send lots of it - even for products like miracle pills that only one
person in a million buys - until recipients are swamped with spam. The
inevitable has happened. E-mail marketers are finding their electronic
fields so despoiled and barren of paying customers that they must move
on," the article said. "There are only so many e-mail addresses and so
many people who opt onto lists," Timothy C. Choate , chief executive of
online ad company Aptimus , told the paper. "You can only contact people
so many times." * The New York Times: Marketers Adjust As Spam Clogs The
Arteries of E-Commerce (Registration required) (Article is from Dec. 1)
No Blue Laws for Blue Spam
Spam legislation is weaving its way through Congress and state houses
across the nation, but companies might have to be on alert for the type
of spam that is likely bombarding its workers. "Legal experts are
warning companies to do more to stop pornographic spam reaching
employees. Firms that do not take steps to stop sexually explicit spam
could face lawsuits from employees suffering distress because of
exposure to offensive images," BBC News Online wrote in a Dec. 3
article. "The experts urge companies to deploy anti-spam tools and curb
offensive messages before they reach workers' desktops. 'This is an
obvious case where employers are directly liable to their employees,'
said net law expert Dr. Brian Bandey ." * BBC News Online: Sexual Spam
Could Spark Lawsuits (Article is from Dec. 3)
The Buzz on Cell Phones
For the latest information about
spam
The Goals of spam
The goal of spam
is to determine the intrinsic grouping in a set of unlabeled data. But
how to decide what constitutes a good spam? It can be shown that
there is no absolute “best” criterion which would be independent of the
final aim of the spam. Consequently, it is the user which must
supply this criterion, in such a way that the result of the spam
will suit their needs.
For instance, we could be interested in finding representatives for
homogeneous groups (data reduction), in finding “natural
clusters” and describe their unknown properties (“natural” data
types), in finding useful and suitable groupings (“useful” data
classes) or in finding unusual data objects (outlier detection).
For the latest information about
The Goals of spam
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
Spam Tool
