Controlling E-Mail Spam

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Overview of E-Mail Spam Controls

Unfortunately, the Internet is rife with spam. Your e-mail's in box is being bombarded continually. Spam cannot be eliminated, only controlled. ESD controls spam in two ways:

To identify spam, a means is needed to classify e-mail traffic. To perform this categorization, e-mail is filtered. Early filtering programs simply classified e-mail as "spam" or "not spam". They were ultimately unsuccessful, because some legitimate e-mail was blocked while some spam was allowed. The filter was too coarse.

Todays e-mail filters are very spohisticated, employing complex (some would say byzantine) stochastic filtering rules. Ignoring the details, these services break your e-mail stream into 4 categories:

  1. non-deliverable (block; content is definitily spam)
  2. probably spam (quarantine)
  3. suspicious; might be spam (bulk)
  4. deliverable (always allow; content is definitely not spam)

As users, we will always receive category 4 e-mail, and we can choose to receive category 2 [QUAR] and category 3 [BULK] e-mail as well. You may have wondered about the [QUAR] and [BULK] suffixes to some of your e-mail messages. Our district's Barracuda filter removes all category 1 e-mail before you ever see it, currently 44% of all e-mail traffic destined for your in box.

Spammers are constantly attempting to reconfigure their spam so that it does not get caught by filtering programs. Filtering programmers are just as busy trying to outwit the spammers and catch whatever they concoct. Spam content and spam filtering algorithms are changed constantly. It's a battle! At any point in time a general spam upsurge signifies that the spammers have won a skirmish. Similarly, a lull implies filterers are prevailing.

As e-mail consumers, we can help ourselves by helping the spam filterers. Please click on the Barracuda and Outlook links to learn how.