Archive for November 2011
Spam Filter Test – How Does it Work?
Is or isn’t a message spam? This is how a spam filter test works. Who needs such a test? Web developers that depend on email marketing campaigns are the first interested in knowing whether their newsletters have any chances of passing an over zealous anti-spam program. A web marketing campaign can be thus tested against spam blockage tools. Here are a few tips to check how things work.
The spam features in a newsletter are easy to identify if you have a mailing list software that generates the messages. There are modern programs that have the feature incorporated while others require subscribing to get access to the service. The help documentation of an email blaster should help you identify the spam email filter test application. The testing mechanism could be outdated but even when they don’t correspond to the latest trend, they can still provide some form of guidance.
The spam filter test variants include reports on headers as well as spam scoring details. The tests for Outlook and Outlook Express can even be performed online. There are other concerns related to the spam filter tests and these represent the evaluation of anti-spam programs from the perspective of the user. This time we refer to the spam filter test meant to determine how efficient a filter is against spam.
The really good anti-spam tools are those that can distinguish legitimate messages from real spam, and not the programs that block as many emails as possible. A spam filter test should be able to find out how many legitimate emails a anti-spam tool blocks and how many real spam messages pass undetected. Software designers thus aim to train programs to learn how to avoid such mistakes.
The spam filter test requires the use of an email that is unknown to the program. Results would be unrealistically good for the email sender that was used in training, which is why experts divide the messages they use in testing as training and control groups. In case such experiments are successful all the way, then, the Internet may become a spam free zone.
Spam – Spam Filter Software
SPAM or unsolicited email accounts to 80% of global email traffic. This means that most of us spend an ever increasing amount of unnecessary time sifting through our inbox’s. Whether you work for a business or are just an individual you will find this very irritating, especially when everyday you may have over 100 spam emails. Some of the mail is often fraudulent and can cause a lot of damage to computers and files.
If you don’t know who the email is off and you think it is spam the best thing to do is not open it and junk mail the email if you have this tool with your email provider. It seems there are no laws to protect us however some countries do have anti spam laws but the spammers always find a way around this by finding other countries to target like the UK where no laws are in place at the moment.
Companies who have a website are more likely to receive spam due to your email address on your website. It can take a good hour to sift through a company inbox full of spam, this wastes time and lost revenue for the company. Spam can also make your computer system shut down and loose data via worms and viruses. These issues cause more problems for a company in time as well as money. In the last 6 years spam has rapidly increased from 8% of emails being sent in 2001 to 40% of emails being spam in 2006/7.
So what can we do to prevent or stop spam? Well you can use a spam filters but these only do half the job. They can easily make errors and accidentally delete legitimate mail, which especially is a work environment, can be very important. There is also password system where you don’t accept an email from an unknown source unless it has your password. Obviously the trouble with this is that anyone who you don’t know and who doesn’t know your password wont get through and you may miss important emails from people you may know but don’t have your password. This is obviously not good for companies that rely on new customers emailing them.
Your best bet is to find a good piece of spam filter software that will capture emails that look like spam before you receive the email in your inbox. You may then be able to just check you junk inbox and see if any of the emails it has put in there are not spam, this is only possible on some email providers. You inbox should now only show your emails from mainly people you know and maybe the odd email of spam but the spam filter software will definitely help reduce your spam problem.
What Is a Spam Filter?
A Spam filter looks at the body of an email and uses a set of rules to decide whether or not it is spam. For example, if the email has the word “Viagra” in it — it is spam.
How is it different than a Spam Blocker?
A spam blocker looks at the header (e.g., To:, From:, IP Address, etc.) and based on a list of known spam header characteristics, decides whether or not it is spam. For example, if the email comes from a known spam address — it is spam.
You can see that spam filters and spam blockers do the same thing in different ways.
Why you need a software solution
Not too long ago, it was pretty simple: you could look at an email and tell it was spam. So you’d just click the delete key and move on.
But a couple of things happened.
The volume of email increased; The percentage of those emails that was spam increased
The solution was straightforward: use automated software to scan the emails and calculate a score for each one. The higher the score, the more likely it is to be spam. If the score is high enough, move the spam to the “spam” folder or the “Junk” folder.
The spammers responded by doing one or more of the following:
Disguising words that made the score too high Adding a flood of neutral (or even gibberish) words to throw off the score.. …and more.
Suddenly, sending out lists of spam keywords became impractical; a better system was developed. Something had to be done.
Bayesian filtering: The indispensable tool
This kind of spam filter calculates a score but it also gets smarter the more you use it.
Here’s how it works:
Imagine that you open your email inbox. You see some email that you suspect is spam, but you’re not sure. So you open it and, sure enough, it is spam.
Now also imagine that you have anti spam software that uses a Bayesian filter.
Here’s what you do next:
For the first piece of spam, you click a button. The anti spam software “reads” the email and remembers certain characteristics. Then it deletes it.
Then you open the next suspicious email. It’s different than the first one, but it is still spam, so you click the button again. The anti spam software examines this piece of spam and adds its characteristics to the list. Next time another piece of email comes in with those characteristics — straight to the Junk folder.
Do this for every piece of email that you suspect is spam. The more you do it, the more detailed your list of spam-characteristics gets. Pretty soon the list is detailed enough that the anti spam software can predict — on its own — when an email is spam. It can then move that spam to the Junk folder all by itself. You don’t have to be involved.
I have simplified the process to make it easy to understand. In practice, the anti spam filter can look at a lot of different characteristics:
Words in the body of the message, Headers, HTML code (like colors) Pairs of words, Phrases Where the words appear in relation to other words …and more.