Why most anti-spam systems dont work and how to get an effective anti-spam solution

The problem of spam has been getting worse. In recent years spam has been an annoying nuisance such as advertising. During 2006 there has been a considerable worsening of the problem with an enormous increase in the number and sophistication of fraud, being perpetrated through spam.

I first became aware of how serious the problem is when I received an email which advised me that an additional person has been authorised to access my online bank account. I am fairly computer literate and well aware of the common deceptions which are delivered by email, but this one looked particularly convincing. So much so that I phoned the bank to check if it was real (of course it wasnt genuine).

I thought, well, if someone as computer literate as myself could be even half-convinced that the email was genuine, undoubtedly some of the novices on the internet would fall for the trap. If the spammers send out a million emails, they only need to play the numbers to uncover a few naive internet users who will fall for the spammers criminal tactics.

I then asked around some of the most computer-literate people I know. Several of them had fallen victim to scams. There is no doubt that these criminals are getting much smarter and more sophisticated in the types of frauds they perpetrate.

For example, one of the most highly computer literate people I know recently fell victim to scam which was related to eBay. He had recently purchased an item on eBay. Shortly afterwards he received an email asking for his credit card details. As the two events happened around the same time, my friend mistakenly thought that the spam was a genuine request from eBay for credit card details. After a day or so my friend realised his mistake, but meanwhile he was defrauded from his credit card account.

Stories abound about people who have fallen for quite simple frauds, such as the Nigerian scam. I believe people need to have some level of common sense to avoid scams as obvious as those. Of greater concern is the new spate of sophisticated spam scams.

Spam statistics show an increase of 30% in the past year. Today, 80% of the email in the world is spam. Why is spam increasing so fast? The answer is simple. Spam fraud is a huge success for the criminals behind it. The more profitable the fraud, the more the criminals will invest in developing smarter methods of stealing money from you.

To make matters worse, some of the people who sell protection software are allegedly the same people who are spreading the problem. There have been some notorious cases of people and organisations who develop new viruses and also sell the anti-virus solutions.

What can you do to protect yourself?

Companies such as Symantec www.symantec.com are selling protection software. (By the way I am not suggesting for one moment that Symantec are doing anything disreputable). But, is a software solution the right way for you go? After all, you have to install it. The other concern about software solutions is that in order for them to work you have to firstly bring the spam into your network. There are many disadvantages to this, including that the traffic itself clogs up your internet link and your server. Also, once the spam is inside your network or your computer, if the spam filter does not deal with it correctly then you will have to deal with the consequences.

I believe there is a simpler and smarter way to protect yourself against spam. The answer is anti-spam managed filtering services. These services come in a couple of different types. Some of the anti-spam services are marketed to large business and government clients.

There are also some anti-spam services which are designed for small to medium businesses. It is even available to individuals. One of the most effective systems for small to medium business is the SpamDetour service the worldwide link is www.spamdetour.com. In Australia the link is www.spamdetour.com.au

SpamDetour requires no installation or configuration and is therefore suited for people and/or organisations with little or no computer / internet skills.

The biggest advantage of spam filter managed services over software, is that the managed services keep the spam far away from your network and/or your computer. Would you invite criminals inside your house and then deal with the problem of removing them? Obviously not. You would keep the criminals as far away as possible. Yet thats how most anti-spam systems work; they bring spam into your network to be dealt with. Managed anti-spam services work in a completely different way to software based anti-spam systems. The managed anti spam services create a new location for your email domain, which is generally at an Internet Service Provider site. This acts as a spam trap. Then, once your email reaches the spam trap the filter takes over and directs genuine email to the real user, and it directs spam to a storage area on the anti-spam managed service server where it cannot do any harm to you, the user, or to your business.

Of course, no anti-spam system is 100% accurate. From time to time it is possible that a genuine email will be classified as spam, or that spam will sneak past the filter and reach into your computer or your network. Still, this is much less likely to happen with a managed service than with an in-house spam filter.

The best anti-spam managed services on the market allow you to log in and check your spam to pick up any errors in the system, add blacklists and whitelists, fine tune the system. If you find any genuine emails on the anti spam database you can pick them up from the spam trap and direct them to your own network and computer.

If you are a high-tech internet user, a computer specialist or a large organisation you may well have your anti-spam protection strategy worked out. On the other hand, if you are an individual or a small to medium business then an anti-spam managed service is a simple, practical and cost effective solution.

A major benefit of the anti spam managed service is that it saves time. If you add up the millions of people who have to manually pick spam out of their email every day, waste time dealing with fraudulent spam, read unwanted advertising etc., the cost to the economy is enormous - billions of dollars each year.

Some of the anti-spam managed services offer a free trial or money back guarantee. I believe that anti spam managed services, with the anti-spam technology provided by experts are the only way the world is going to combat the problem of spam.

Michael Wilson is an accountant living in Sydney, Australia. One of his interests to develop the internet for the purpose of providing genuine benefits to the community, and to reduce exploitation of the medium.

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