Spam Filter E-mail - Email Spam Filter

E-mail spam, also known as "bulk e-mail" or "junk e-mail," is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by e-mail. A common synonym for spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE). Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk."UCE" refers specifically to "unsolicited commercial e-mail."

E-mail spam slowly but exponentially grew for several decades to several billion messages a day. Spam has frustrated, confused, and annoyed e-mail users. Laws against spam have been sporadically implemented, with some being opt-out and others requiring opt in e-mail. The total volume of spam (over 100 billion emails per day as of April 2008) has leveled off slightly in recent years, and is no longer growing exponentially. The amount received by most e-mail users has decreased, mostly because of better filtering. About 80% of all spam is sent by fewer than 200 spammers. Botnets, networks of virus-infected computers, are used to send about 80% of spam. The cost of spam is borne mostly by the recipient, so it is a form of postage due advertising.

E-mail addresses are collected from chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. Much of spam is sent to invalid e-mail addresses. ISPs have attempted to recover the cost of spam through lawsuits against spammers, although they have been mostly unsuccessful in collecting damages despite winning in court

I check my email every morning and 90% of the stuff in my inbox is advertising related content. It's frustrating because although my internet service provider does offer anti spam software on their email servers, I've had it block emails that were actually legitimate and meant for me -- emails from friends overseas or friends emailing me with their work emails, so in turn I had to turn the ISP filter off.

Of course, without any filters running, I would have to filter through all my emails manually every morning. It started to become a problem as the amount of spam emails continued to increase, and eventually I would wake up with 100+ spam emails every morning, with only 5 or so out of the 100 actually being legitimate.

I started to realized that stopping spam email in it's tracks was not so easy. I also became overly frustrated as I started to research for some software that would run on Microsoft Outlook, rather than on the ISP side on their servers. I installed and ran a handful of filters on my computer at home, unfortunately I kept being disappointed. The filters were either time consuming to use or blocked emails that were meant for me (I'm talking about emails sent from University email accounts! How is that spam?).

I then started researching Spam more deeply and I came across an interesting idea. The idea is based around the way we as people manually filter our inbox. For instance, if you gave a stranger your email account they could no doubt filter your spam as well, it's not hard to see what is unwanted junk. So why is it so hard to make a software spam filter that will filter emails depending on their content? For instance, advertising related keywords appearing in the email more than once will automatically flag that email as advertisement or spam. It is easy for us to recognize a spam email, we see phrases such as Buy Viagra Now and we automatically know it's spam! Why can't software do the same thing?

I did settle for a reasonably good spam filter though, and I've been running it for almost a month now without any real problems. This kind of software is the closest we can get at the moment to being 100% reliable. Although, I must say it's been running so far blocking all spam emails without blocking one single legitimate email -- which is pretty good if you ask me!

Julian is an IT expert and webmaster. If you want to find out more about spam filtering or grab a hold of a special spam software package then check this website out.

Spam is unsolicited and unwanted email. Other common names of spam are spam mail, bulk email or just junk mail. Today, spam has reached such monumental proportions that almost every other message we receive is spam. Protecting the inbox with spam filter email has become one of the barest necessities for almost all PC users.

In a few words, spam filter email software helps detect spam. It is a program that detects unsolicited and unwanted e-mails, and doesn’t let them slipping into your inbox. The anti-spam program is installed onto your computer and filters your inbound emails. The email filtering is carried out based on a number of criteria. These can be specific words in the subject line or in the body of the message, type of files attached to the message, images embedded into the message. You could set the filter to check the sender’s email address out. If you have your own whitelist or address book with trusted email addresses, you could arrange the anti-spam filter to refer to that whitelist. It also can detect known spammers by checking a blacklist of habitual spam senders maintained by certain Internet Service Providers. If the email sender is on the blacklist, the message is rejected.

spam filter email have adapted to the wiles of the spammers. They use techniques that do not trash legitimate emails by effectively analyzing the content of the email. Such software looks for keywords and tries to interpret their meanings in the sentences. Certain spam filters reject the messages if they come to you in the form of "Undisclose
d Recipients", and accept the emails where your email address is in the “To” or “Cc” fields.
Anti-spam filter is an essential part of your computer’s security tools if you want to ensure that you only receive the emails you want. Now you can select the right anti-spam software for your computer and start fighting spam.