An Anti Spam Filter?

What' s that? Do I need one of those?

What is spam anyway and why is it named after a potted meat?
Can an anti spam filter eliminate spam entirely?
Why do I get spam? How did they get my email address?
Is spam dangerous?

If you have used email for more than a couple of weeks, you probably have received some "spam" already - even though you might not have called it that when you saw it. Spam is the common term for unsolicited commercial email (or UCE) or the internet version of junk mail to you and me.

Just like the junk mail you receive in your regular mailbox, spam is people or companies are trying to sell you a product or service. Unfortunately, along with legitimate pitches, spam often includes advertisements for questionable products (think male performance enhancement drugs), get rich quick schemes (make millions from home), and even illegal scams (send us a check so we can release your inheritance). Another variety called "porn spam" often exposes users to unseemly sexual images by using deceiving subject lines.

So, why is called spam? It's not because of the great flavor. The term actually originated in a Monty Python skit, believe it or not (most techies find Monty Python immensely entertaining). In the skit, a crowd of people drowned out the man trying to address them by chanting "spam, spam, spam" - over and over again so that the speaker could not be heard. That's what email spam does, it drowns out the "real" messages in your inbox.

In addition to being incredibly annoying and a real productivity killer (current estimates are that 7 out of every 10 email messages are spam), some spam can be dangerous. Scam spam and "pump and dump" stock spam (messages that promote a trash stock with thousands of mails thereby artificially - and temporarily, inflating it's worth) can bilk you out of your hard earned cash. Porn scam can install malware known as auto-dialers which run up your phone bill. Some hackers use spam messages to install worms, trojans, and back door programs.

An anti spam filter attempts to identify spam email and either move it to a seperate folder or delete it, so that you don't have to deal with it constantly. You know the drill when you start your email program, you usually spend the first ten minutes (at least) weeding out the crap - and then all day you long, every time your email dings, you stop and check - spam again! Argh!

Think about it, if 70% of your incoming messages are spam, an effective filter could save you a lot of time.

An anti spam filter trys to take care of that time-sucking job for you. The filter looks at things like who the message is from, what the subject line says, what the body or message contains, the time of day it was sent, the location and name of the mail handler, and various other factors. It then trys to decide for you if the message is desirable or not. Some filters get smarter and smarter as you use them like the popular open source anti spam filter Spam Bayes.

The bottom line is that spam isn't going away any time soon and anything you can do to reduce it's effect (including using an anti spam filter) is a good thing.