Spam and viruses are becoming an increasing problem for site owners, to the point that many webmasters receive more junk and security threats than they do legitimate email each day. It is estimated that over 50% of mail circulating around the Internet at any given time is comprised of spam or email viruses.
Remember the SoBig virus? Well over 1 million computers were infected within the first couple of days. SoBig caused more damage to in August 2003 than did the Klez virus for the entire year of 2002. Spam and viruses cause you stress, frustration and cost you money - in time spent dealing with it, through blown out mailboxes, excess storage fees and in actual damage through infection.
Detecting spam
People tend to be much less bothered by spam slipping through filters into their mail box (false negatives), than having desired e-mail ("ham") blocked (false positives). Trying to balance false negatives (missed spams) vs false positives (rejecting good e-mail) is critical for a successful anti-spam system.
Some systems let individual users have some control over this balance by setting "spam score" limits, etc. Most techniques have both kinds of errors, to varying degrees. So, for example, anti-spam systems may use techniques that have a high false negative rate (miss a lot of spam), in order to reduce the number of false positives (rejecting good e-mail),
Detecting spam based on the content of the e-mail, either by detecting keywords such as "viagra" or by statistical means, is very popular. Such methods can be very accurate when they are correctly tuned to the types of legitimate email that an individual gets, but they can also make mistakes such as detecting the keyword "cialis" in the word "specialist"; see also Internet censorship#"By-catch". The content also doesn't determine whether the email was either unsolicited or bulk, the two key features of spam. So, if a friend sends you a joke that mentions "viagra", content filters can easily mark it as being spam even though it is neither unsolicited nor sent in bulk.
Spyware Spam l works between your email client and your POP email account, managing the email flow before it arrives to you and checking it against a multitude of known block lists of your choice, like SPEWS, SpamCop or SpamHaus, or even based on IP addresses, ISP or whole countries. It will then flag your messages with an easy indicator in the subject, making it easy to filter them directly in some spam folder to check out later. It also offers bayesian filtering and white listing.
Anti spam fights spam bots
The purpose of this page is to make it so spammers who attempt to collect email addresses off the web, via programs, will not have real email addresses in their database. Anti-Spam causes problems because they will have to clean out their list. It also makes their database worthless for reselling purposes because the company purchasing their spam database will have worthless email address.
How ANTI-SPAM works
This page has fifty randomly generated email addresses (refresh and new ones will appear). At the bottom of the page is a link to this page again, essentially reloading it for programs to collect more fake email addresses. Email collecting programs (spam bots) will be sent into an infinite loop by following the link at the bottom of the page and will get more and more fake email addresses stuck in their databases.
Spam is the electronic world's biggest problem. A fool proof method of filtering out spam does not yet exist, but we don't have to sit back and take it. Anti-Spam pages like this one make spamming less profitable and is our way to help FIGHT SPAM.
