What is Spam?
Spam is unwanted email flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

Cloudmark Desktop  (Recommended)

SpamBayes for Windows

5 don'ts and 3 dos for handling spam e-mail

Our email solution provides built in anti-spam filtering services.

How Does It Work?

• TEK911’s Anti-Spam Engine looks through each email you receive and compares it to a pre-existing rule set* of known spammer tricks.
• The Engine uses a points system. When email comes in with “Viagra” on it, it is assigned a certain point value. When the same email comes in 10 times from the same source, that's another point value. When the engine tags each email with a certain number of "points", it considers it spam
• If the spam email does not fit the current rule set, the filtration system will study the email and generate a new rule set based on the new spam received.
• The filtration system has a small chance of false positives (good email marked as spam) due to the intelligent engine used to examine email.

Note: A Rule Set is a conditional statement that tells the system how to react to a particular situation.
 

What are Spam tactics?

• Spammers have been documented as stealing other site's domain names via email forgery.
• Spammers solicited donations for relatives of the victims of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the USA.
• Spammers supply a phone number that you are supposed to call to be removed. The call can cost $2 per minute.
• Spammers will sell someone a mailing list and tell them that the people on it want advertising e-mail.
• Spammers will embed viruses and applications to exploit your mail and computers.

How does Spam impact business?
Businesses are constantly looking for ways to prevent fraud, waste and abuse, and increase productivity and stopping Spam is one way to achieve this. Time spent receiving, reading and deleting spam is wasted time. It also consumes network, hardware, and software resources. The rate of Spam on the Internet doubles every six months and costs millions of dollars to process. An estimated 50% of all email on the internet is spam and is growing. Reading and deleting spam is the quickly becoming one of the largest areas that business owners are concerned about. Employees waste countless hours a month reading and deleting spam.

Based on an average of 3,000 emails received daily per email account, applying the Anti-Spam Service would increase online productivity by 75%. By combining TEK911’s robust technology, with the secure and powerful applications that filter and scan email, TEK911’s Anti-Spam Service will benefit any company, big or small. TEK911’s Anti-Spam engine “learns” as you tell it what you wish to discontinue receiving. This solution requires NO CLIENT HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE. As a matter of fact, it ties right to your hosting account with TEK911. Order TEK911’s email Service, and see how TEK911 can improve the productivity of your business. Save time, money and reduce the aggravation of constantly battling spam. Eliminate SPAM from your mail today!

SpamBayes for Windows (free)
(suitable for almost all email clients, including Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Express)

SpamBayes is a tool used to segregate unwanted mail (spam) from the mail you want (ham). Before SpamBayes can be your spam filter of choice you need to train it on representative samples of email you receive. After it's been trained, you use SpamBayes to classify new mail according to its spamminess and hamminess qualities. It's best to train on recent email, because your interests and the nature of what spam looks like change over time.

When SpamBayes filters your email, it compares each unclassified message against the information it saved from training and makes a decision about whether it thinks the message qualifies as ham or spam, or if it's unsure about how to classify the message. It then adds its classification to the message, either by adding a header (X-Spambayes-Classification: spam|ham|unsure), modifying the To: or Subject: headers, or adding a "Spam" field to the message. Depending on which SpamBayes application you are using, it may then filter this message for you, or you can set up your own filters (to file away suspected spam into its own mail folder, for example).

More information and download