SPAM! It's terrible! It wastes our time! It gets in the way of our friends and our work! Does anything stop it? Yes. I'm going to tell you why current solutions don't work and give you one that really does work, is easy to use, and is affordable. It works so well, you don't need to manage it or think about it.
The SPAM problem is easy to understand. Every day we get unwanted email from people
who don’t care that we’re doing our best not to get e-mail from them. We end up going through our mail box deleting
the junk, and sometimes accidentally deleting things we need. Sometimes there is so much junk that our important
communications don’t get through.
Two approaches address this problem: SPAM filtering and Challenge Response.
SPAM filtering is a layer of software that filters your
incoming e-mail and moving files that the computer thinks are junk into a junk
mail box. This software isn’t perfect, when
it tests incoming mail to decide if it is junk, sometimes junk e-mail gets into
your inbox (a false negative) and sometimes legitimate email ends up in your
junk box (a false positive). A good SPAM
filter program installs additional buttons in your e-mail software so that you
can click on an e-mail in either your inbox or junk folders to tell the
software if that message is SPAM or not.
The software then modifies its rules and “learns” to do a better
job. However, as long as you are getting
some false positives or some false negatives, you still have the same
problem. Now, instead of going through
your inbox and deleting junk, you are going through your junk mail box
un-deleting legitimate mail. Either way,
you’re going through all of the mail or you’re missing some important messages.
Challenge Response is a different approach to solving this
problem. Challenge response anti-spam
software works by intercepting incoming mail just like SPAM filter software,
but it looks at who is sending you the e-mail and compares the sender’s e-mail
address to a database of known senders.
The software maintains a white-list and a black-list. All e-mails from senders on the white-list
are accepted, and all e-mails from senders on the black-list are deleted. When an unknown sender e-mails you, the
software doesn’t find that person’s email address in either list. The software sends an e-mail back to the
sender, explaining that it is an anti-spam system, and gives the user a link to
click on to prove they are a real person reading your mail. The link takes them to a web page where they
see a code on the screen and type that code into a box. When they submit the web form, they are
automatically added to your white list and their original e-mail (and all
future emails from this sender) get through.
The challenge response software is able to import your e-mail client’s address
book and it also monitors your outgoing mail and automatically white-lists
anyone you send mail to.
There is still a problem with Challenge Response. The first is that people are lazy, when they
get your challenge e-mail sometimes they are too lazy to fill it out. Also, the Challenge-Response system is a
little anti-social. However, it works
very well. I installed ChoiceMail from
DigiPortal software. I went instantly
from getting over 100 junk e-mail SPAM messages per day down to none. My legitimate mail gets through. Sometimes I get e-mail from news letters
which aren’t going to see my challenge sent by ChoiceMail software so
periodically I check so see which senders ChoiceMail is waiting for a response
from and manually approve those senders.
I can also add entire domains to the white list. ChocieMail also comes with a powerful rule
system that you can customize to automatically white-list senders based on
contents of e-mail messages.
The bottom line:
- The
software is very affordable at $39.95.
- The software works with your ISP's mail, Hotmail, AOL, MSN and Hotmail accounts, but you have to use a Pop mail reader such as Outlook or Eudora with the web based services instead of your web browser.