Foiling the spam pitch

Spam, those unwanted, bulk-mailed commercial pitches arriving in your e-mail inbox, has become such a pervasive problem that it difficult to determine just how bad it really is.

Internet Resources

By Korky Koroluk

Spam, those unwanted, bulk-mailed commercial pitches arriving in your e-mail inbox, has become such a pervasive problem that it difficult to determine just how bad it really is.

Two years ago there was a mere handful of companies marketing solutions to the problem. Today there are more than 200. All of them have their own “research” showing how bad the problem is, but I can’t escape the feeling that the purpose is not to define the problem. I suspect the real purpose is to sell software.

Now a lot of people in the SOHO market (that’s small office, home office) are finding that half or more of their e-mail is spam. People in larger firms, whose e-mail arrives through a gateway in a company server, do much better, but even they often have to set up some filters because of spam that sneaks through.

All that has led me to try out some of the commercial anti-spam applications that are on the market, to talk to an IT professional, and to do a lot of reading on the subject. What I found is not encouraging—at least in the short term.

For example, when I downloaded and installed Cloudmark’s SpamNet, I was disturbed to find that the volume of spam arriving on my doorstep almost doubled, and Spam- Net was only moderately successful in dealing with it.

When I mentioned the phenomenon of increased spam to Melanie Wheeler, who looks after the IT needs of Daily Commercial News, she wasn’t surprised. She said it’s possible that a hacker has laid hands on Cloudmark’s customer list, either for his own use, or to sell to spammers. Either way, she said, more spam would be the likely result.

So I tried Spam Inspector, from Giant Software. I’d had good reports on it, and it did seem to work fairly well. But I found that it placed its own ad at the end of all my outgoing e-mails, and I couldn’t figure out how to prevent it except to manually delete it from every message before sending.

They may think of that as good marketing. I think of it as just one short step away from being spam itself.

Which led me, finally, to MailWasher, a slightly geeky, slightly buggy application that really seems to work.

Buggy? Well, it was supposed to read my e-mail account information and configure itself accordingly. It didn’t. That meant that I had to enter the POP3 server addresses manually for the four accounts I use for incoming mail, as well as the SMTP server address for outgoing mail.

If you’re comfortable doing things like that, then you shouldn’t have any trouble with MailWasher, even though there are other minor bugs as well. If you’re not, you might want either to look elsewhere, or find someone who is fairly familiar with e-mail systems to help you with the configuration.

I haven’t tried the anti-spam offerings from McAfee and Norton because the reviews I’ve seen of them have been uniformly bad.

Many of the anti-spam applications out there are designed for the single user, which won’t do anything for you if you’re running a local network. One of the things I like about MailWasher is that there is a version that lives on your company server.

The whole business of spam is something I’ll come back to next week, when I’ll also pass along some tips from Wheeler, precautions you can take to reduce the amount of spam you get.

In the meantime, if you want to do some research of your own, you can find out more about MailWasher by pointing your browser at www.mailwasher.net

Even better, Timberline Technologies, which makes a range of construction-related software, has collected a list of e-mail security products and posted it on their Web site. Anumber of them deal with spam.

You’ll find the list at www.timberlinetechnolog ies.com/products/email.html

You’re always welcome to comment on anything you see in this column, or suggest topics for discussion. You can reach me at korkykoroluk@rogers.com