November 25, 2014

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Keyboard Click anti spam

Where does Spam come from?

Where does Spam come from?

It would seem to be logical that if we can identify where spam comes from, it would be easy to stop the spammers. One of the parameters that spam filtering services work with is identifying the Internet Service Providers (ISP) of a message and then blocking the ISP. This is why legitimate emails sometimes wind up in your spam folder, the filter is working based upon an assumption that if the majority of spam comes from India, Vietnam and Brazil then blocking all message from ISPs in those countries will prevent spam from breaking through to your inbox. Unfortunately, there are legitimate businesses that are also registered on those ISPs as well and they can get sent to the spam folder too if you are not using a dynamic filtering service like Clean Message.

Spam by Country

Another thing that filtering and security services have been able to show is that the type of spam tends to vary from country to country. Spam from Asia is going to try and sell you something. You may be surprised to find out that spam that has viruses to steal your information or control of your machine tends to come from America. Nigerian ISPs have a high rate of spam associated addresses, with almost 62% of the registered addresses from Nigeria being associated with spamming.

Why those countries?

Spammers use these ISPs because the country’s Internet laws allow for certain types of activities that may be banned on ISPs registered in other countries. Similar to how online gambling can work, a casino may have to have an ISP located in Croatia in order to legally operate, but anyone in the world can use the site, as long as their earnings are process in a legal area as well. The issue with spam is not the ISP address it comes from, this only helps to identify loopholes in international data laws and individual country Internet laws, but where the spam originates from. Using online gambling as an example again, the casino with the Croatian ISP may be owned and operated by someone in Florida. To stop spam completely, you have to find the owner and masking the owner’s identity is too easy on the Internet and too costly to uncover.

The importance of Anti-spam services

Uncovering owner identity is too costly when the industry is dependent on goodwill development of spam filters by services like Google. Dedicated spam filtering service providers, like CleanMessage, not only help to gather and analyze statistical data that can be used for shaping Internet policy and laws, but it also allows for monetary resources to be refocused on fighting the origination of spam, not just blocking it as it comes in.

June 11, 2014

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Spam filter

Understanding Spam Filters

Here to Help With The Basics of Understanding Spam Filters

When you are deciding what type of spam filter will be best for your business, there are several things to consider. Buying the most expensive program or subscribing to the highest level of spam filtering service may not always be the best thing to do. The key to selecting the right spam filtering is to match the economy and efficiency of the filter to the level of spam you need to filter, while also planning for the future. Whatever product you decide to use should be able to resolve your immediate problem with spam, and be expandable to handle future modifications to spam practices.

Why filtering always has to change

Spam and viruses not only travel hand in hand, they have much in common in their implementation practices. As developers create tools and resources to effectively filter spam, like they create security products to detect viruses; the spammer has to change their structure and approach to circumvent the filter to get their spam into your inbox. This is why you cannot expect to buy one product or sign up for a static filtering service and be done with the problem for life. Spam changes to work around filters; you need a filter that changes dynamically as well to keep you protected.

The Basic Filter

The basic spam filter is also the most efficient, but the least practical for your business. The basic filter consists of an instruction to the filter to block and redirect any incoming message that does not match a registered address in your contacts list to the spam box or trash. This was one of the most highly effective ways to protect a personal email box because unlike a business, personal emails don’t often contain unknown address contacts that are important. The problem with the basic filter is that spammers have used a variety of methods to scrape contact lists in order to generate spam that appears to come from someone you know to bypass the filter.

Customizing Parameters

A better choice for filtering is to customize the parameters of the filter. The parameters set the rules of logic for a filtering program to decide whether an email is most likely spam or not. For personal use, you can ask it to look at subject lines, internal links and contact addresses and increase the chances of it filtering the majority of spam. For businesses, you need a more dynamic solution where the parameters can include source IPs, redirection detection, content analysis and keyword analysis. For a business, it is also vitally important that these parameters are dynamically managed and updated on a regular basis. Unless you have a large enough business to dedicate money to fighting spammers, it is more cost efficient to subscribe to a filtration service such as CleanMessage.