The software tools to junk spam

PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY

It is Monday morning and the entire office is getting ready for the week. Some are even drafting their leave letter (for sick leave of course) for Wednesday when India will face Pakistan in Lahore for the last and crucial one-dayer.

Amid the week-beginning frenzy, one bright colleague in the advertising department is contemplating resigning his job. Reason? He just got an email which said he has won a $500,000 over some lottery he doesn't remember participating in!

This colleague, however, on his recent trip to Malaysia had played some video game and had committed the cardinal sin of sharing his email id with the game organisers. A glass of water and some counseling helped dissuade him from his perilous pursuit.

Such junk mails or spam, as they are commonly known, are a pervasive nightmare. According to statistics provided by Brightmail, a company that sells anti-spam software tools, 62 per cent of total internet emails are spams and this number is on the rise. A year back this was only 45 per cent!

From announcements to offers, the range of spam mails can be as wide as your imagination. Spam has become such a global menace that even governmental action was attempted in the US to curb this virtual nuisance.

Why does the world hate spam mails, when it can placidly ignore them? One, it occupies precious memory in the PC or your web mail account. Two, it is a waste of time to read and then delete it. Third and the most important, these junk mails are potent virus carriers.

Brightmail provides further insights into the spam nuisance. An estimated 24 per cent of the spams are related to products, 18 per cent carry financial products including money, 14 per cent are pornography or other adult related stuff, 11 per cent are downright scams (remember the Nigerian investment dupe?).

Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC (MAPS), is a California-based organisation run with a mission to defend the Internet's e-mail system from abuse by spammers.

MAPS defines an electronic message as spam if a) the recipient's personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients b) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for the mail to be sent and c) the transmission and reception of the message appears to the recipient to give a disproportionate benefit to the sender.

E-mail applications (mail clients) have over the years developed or imbibed technologies to identify and exterminate spam.

Bloomba, a downloadable email application, for example, provides protection against spam. The product comes with certain in-built functions that can distinguish between a good and a junk mail.

This product is owned by an Amercian company but is developed by an Indian software firm.

Vijay Babu, president and COO of iSoftTech, developers of Bloomba, says "The anti-spam tool we offer is intelligent, meaning it learns on the fly and segregates spam from good mails, based on its own knowledge pool."

K Chandrashekaran, director, network and system support for Cognizant Technology Solutions, says, "Nowadays a lot of priority has been given to anti-spam efforts. At Cognizant we have been working at the exchange (mail server) level and identify and block 24 types of attachments."

For an institution that employs 10,000 people worldwide and over 7,000 in India, anti-spam measures are definitely a high-priority area. The company is also undertaking a pilot run of an anti-spam tool developed by the US-based company Trend Micro.

The contents of every mail is checked, including the header, subject line, validity of the mail id and most importantly how many email addresses have received copies of the mail.

Typically a huge number of copy addresses (CC) list would trigger the anti-spam tool to watch out for potential mal-intent.

Of course the mail server administrator can tweak the 'anti-spam tool policy' to ensure the genuine mails sent to a large number of addresses are not classified as a junk mail. The indicative cost of the anti-spam tool from Trend Micro is $4 per mail box for the first year and $1.50 for yearly support/maintenance cost.

Web mail service providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail track junk mails and have created special folder to which the classified junk mail will taken, without the user intervention.

Users would normally receive online newsletters to this folder, even if the user had subscribed to the newsletter. Apart from this, users can also block e-mail addresses either the sender alone or all mails originating from the particular domain.

For example you can block mails from spammer@anti-social.com or all mails that end with @anti-social.com.

Brightmail Anti-Spam is a software solution that blocks spam at the internet gateway. Brightmail Anti-Spam offers great accuracy rate available in spam filtering technology, with a false positive rate of fewer than one false-positive (read mistaken identity) in every one million messages identified as spam. (www.brightmail.com)

MailFrontier Enterprise Gateway is another tool which touted as is a high-performance perimeter solution that abolishes the spam, enterprise fraud, viruses, directory harvest attacks, and corporate policy violations that threaten messaging security. (www.mailfrontier.com)

DO IT NOW! Buying an anti-spam tool for your business is not just to keep junk mails at bay. Virus carrying junk mails can cause havoc to business, making anti-spam tools a must for every business. If you already have an anti-virus tool, then an anti-spam tool is only a step away. A small step that would ensure the longevity of your business. Of course, you still have to take care of competition in the conventional ways.