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News last week that Internet service provider Verizon settled its lawsuit against Detroit-based spam king Al Ralsky was of little comfort. Ralsky agreed to pay a fine and stop spamming Verizon customers, but he still has plenty of other targets. And there are still hundreds of other spammers who have never visited a courtroom and are all too eager to fill our inboxes with business propositions from deposed Nigerian dictators. Fortunately, the rise of junk e-mail has fueled a vast anti-spam industry, with ISPs and software makers all competing to solve the Net’s most intractable problem.

The ISPs are beating the anti-spam drum the loudest right now, because spam drives away new customers and clogs up their servers. Most providers combine several approaches. They subscribe to “RBLs,” or real-time blacklists, administered by anti-spam groups like the London-based Spamhaus.org, which maintains constantly updated databases of the worst transgressors and instructs subscribers to block their mail.

Six of the largest 10 ISPs, including MSN and Earthlink, also subscribe to the service of Brightmail. The San Francisco-based company has a team of researchers who constantly monitor dummy e-mail accounts and send out profiles of the latest Net scams, so that ISPs can filter them out before they reach your in-box. (Microsoft’s Hotmail, one of the worst spam magnets on the Net, just signed up.) The problem is that companies like Brightmail, fearing the possibility that their dragnet will block an authentic e-mail, are forced to be conservative. And spammers can easily configure their custom-designed software to respond with “spoilers,” spaces or bits of code placed within messages that fool the filters. Though Brightmail estimates it catches more than 90 percent of spam, spam watchdog groups think the number is closer to half.

That leaves ISPs trying to add anti-spam tools directly to their e-mail programs. Recently released AOL 8 can color-code your messages into three categories: known and unknown senders, and known bulk e-mailers. There’s also a button that lets you report spam directly to AOL. MSN 8 does all this a little better, using machine intelligence designed in Microsoft’s research lab to spot spam and send it to a junk folder.

Users looking for another level of protection can try software solutions, which attempt to block spam on your desktop. Software site Download.com lists more than 200 such programs, many free of charge. Most are “rules-based,” meaning they filter e-mail looking for certain words (“herbal Viagra”) or programming patterns (excessive HTML graphics in the body of the message).

Anti spam software reviews

Among the best programs we’ve tested or heard about: IhateSpam ($29.95) works directly with Outlook or Outlook Express. Exploiting the power of peer-to-peer networks, it reports spam that the software missed to other users of the program. Mailwasher (free, but donation requested), another clever program, bounces back spam to the sender as “undeliverable,” trying to fool spammers into thinking they have a bum address. In our tests, it caught 90 percent of unwanted e-mail. Spam Assassin (also free) takes the same tack, and has a great name, but it can be a tad overaggressive, blacklisting the occasional authentic e-mail.

McAfee’s Spamkiller ($40) gets a thumbs down because it overcharges and generates complaints to the spammer’s e-mail account and ISP. Since spammers often hijack other people’s accounts, this has the ironic effect of sending the complaint to an innocent user. Anti-spam spam?

Mary works in US for a media company, occasionally writing for the biggest Anti spam news portal, and drinking too much coffee.

If you are a business owner and you rely on email, spam is going to be a major concern. How you address it can make a big difference in employee efficiency. Email spam has been a nuisance and has gotten even worse over the last several years. Email spam slows down server performance and can eat away at storage. Cleaning all those bad messages out of your inbox is time consuming. The easiest way for viruses to spread is via email.

Having a strategy to deal with email spam and viruses threats is essential for any business to survive and be productive. You can limit the negative impact to your business by having policies and guidelines in place.

Tips to avoid getting email spam:

• If you have a company web site, use a contact form that the web site visitor
  can fill out. Some spam mers use robots that crawl web pages looking for
  email addresses. Your web site designer should be able to help you with this.
• When signing up for forums, products and services use a free email or throwaway
  account like hotmail or Yahoo mail.
• When signing up for offers be careful what boxes you check although technically
  not spam you may get a lot of email offers you do not want.
• Never reply to an email spam message, this just lets them know that your
  account is active.
• You may want to use a throwaway email address if you post on newsgroups
  or forums.

These measures may help to reduce spam, but if you have an old email address you may want to change your email address or deploy a spam filter system. There are several choices for anti spam systems you could buy software that runs locally on your PC to filter the spam, but this can be expensive, does not prevent virus infection, and is not a good choice in a networked environment. Managing individual machine spam software is inefficient.

If you have limited technical resources you can outsource you email spam filtering to a hosted anti spam and virus solution provider. Spam filter service providers colocate their spam and virus filters in data centers with redundant power and network connections. You will need to change your mail exchanger on your dns servers to point to the service providers spam filters. Your service provider will then scrub your email for spam and viruses. They then forward your email to your mail server minus the spam and viruses. This gives you a few extra layers of protection. In the event of a network outage or server downtime your email is held and is delivered when the network or your server is available minus the virus and spam. Spam filter services also scan for viruses; this adds another layer of defense to the virus software already running on your network.

If you have an organization with more than one hundred email boxes investing in your own spam filter appliance is the most cost effective solution if you have the technical expertise to manage the system. A spam appliance sits in front of your email server and blocks spam and viruses. The price of the spam appliance will depend upon your number of users, amount of mail and storage requirements.

Fighting spam is no longer be a losing battle if you have a good strategy to deal with the threat.

John Tourloukis is the founder of Fast PC Networks Colocation, Disaster
Recovery Services, and Spam Filter Service