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This makes the bad news is that the junk mail or spam is a growing problem, but the good news is that the Internet community is rising to the challenge. …
Safentrix Provides a Fresh Approach to Fighting Spam
THE PROBLEM
This is a story anyone with an Email address will be familiar with. Open your Inbox in the morning and you will find tens (if not hundreds) of emails from people who have absolutely no idea who you are. These emails could be hawking the latest V****a clone or announce that you are the long lost heir of a Minister who has bequeathed $100 million (the catch being you just have to send the courier charges of $5000!).
By the time you are done weeding these emails out, you notice the email from your client saying that your meeting, scheduled for 1 PM has been advanced to 10AM. You glance at your watch and find that it is 10:30!
Junk emails (also known as SPAM) like above cause productivity loss of Millions of Dollars and sometimes cause severe financial damage through fraudulent means. Ever since emails became mainstream communication media in Business, Junk emails increased exponentially. Some estimates say that 90% of all email traffic is Junk.
THE (NOT SO PERFECT) SOLUTION
We have to admit one thing here. Identifying and eliminating SPAM is not easy at all. If the world has 100,000 Computer Viruses to track, it probably has Millions of SPAM to track, and even if you track all the SPAM’s, you would have some genuine emails that look like SPAM.
And some guy somewhere in the Pharma Industry will take offense that his email asking queries about V****a is blocked (because it has that word). So, it is not an easy job at all, identifying SPAM messages. And right from the onset, it was clear that it was going to be a catching up job.
However, many companies provide Anti SPAM solutions. They use technologies with weird sounding names like RBL, URIBL, HELO Verification, Bayesian Filtering, DKIM, SPF, Content checking etc. But their philosophy was identical.
They would try to scan emails using all the jargons mentioned above,
If they were reasonably convinced (in technical terms, probability of it being SPAM is 90% and above), they would put it in a Quarantine.
Now, quarantine is like a separate folder in your Email box. If you had used one of the free Email services like Yahoo! or Hot mail, Quarantine will be equivalent to your “Bulk Email” folder. Ideally, all SPAM’s should end up in Quarantine and all genuine emails in your INBOX. But, as mentioned earlier, SPAM identification is difficult at best (impossible at worst).
This means that occasionally you may find genuine emails in your Quarantine. (Technically these are referred to as “False positives”). You may also find some SPAM in Inbox (Technically referred to as “SPAM misses”).
Your organization implements one of the above Anti SPAM solution. You see better results. When you come in the morning, you find not so many emails in your Inbox. You could quickly go through official emails and start your work. This is the solution you want. This is pure Email bliss!
Well, so you thought, at least until the first time the email from your client landed in Quarantine. Since you never check the quarantine, you again missed the information of meeting being advanced and end up missing the meeting! Back to square one!
You start going through Inbox as well as your Quarantine daily. It is just that you can scan quicker than before as you have two different folders. You still have to scan a whole bunch of emails to make sure you did not miss out on important communication.
And the worse part is that you are told the Anti SPAM solution costs as much as hiring multiple secretaries (who can sift through your emails to delete SPAM).
To summarize, the current Anti SPAM solutions, while trying to their best, are not satisfactory due to:
Administrative burden put on recipient due to the presence of a Quarantine, and
Costs.
SAFENTRIX SOLUTION
SAFENTRIX has a fresh approach to the problem of SPAM. While the technology used by SAFENTRIX consists of pretty much the same jargons with weird sounding names (RBL, URIBL, HELO Verification, DKIM, SPF, etc.), SAFENTRIX differs in:
Having no Quarantine
Having a Free (Free as in beer, not as in speech) service option
Does it mean that SAFENTRIX never wrongly classifies an Email as SPAM?
Not at all. As explained before, SPAM identification is difficult at best and impossible at worst. This means, there are situations where SAFENTRIX does identify genuine emails as SPAM.
The difference is what SAFENTRIX does with such emails.
Any email that is classified as SPAM is rejected by SAFENTRIX at SMTP protocol level itself. This means that the Sender always gets back a bounce message. Typically the bounce message looks like the following:
552-Message categorized as SPAM.
552-If you feel it is mis-categorized, please visit
552-SAFENTRIX Web site to resend the email.
552 Your key is: caeb675710e2e7fac77c9834474f7040 (#5.6.1)
SAFENTRIX generates a unique key for each email thus rejected.
Now let us come back to the scenario where you missed emails from client informing of change of meeting time. We will look at what happens if you were using SAFENTRIX.
Say client sent this email the previous day. A bounce message like the one above, would have been received (by the client) within 10 minutes of his sending the email. Client now notices that the email has not reached you (this itself avoids a lot of misunderstanding) and the bounce message says something about SPAM.
Client goes to the site given in bounce message, enters all the details given, including the SPAM key. This white lists the rejected communication. Now, client resends the email and it reaches you fine.
Next morning the email is there in your Inbox and you go to the meeting at correct time.
Let us be a little pessimistic and say that client went off home immediately after sending an email to you and thus does not see the bounce message. Next day when he is in office, preparing for the meeting,
He notices the bounce message,
Realizes that you are not informed of the change in timing,
And either informs you by other means (say phone) if that gives you enough notice,
And if enough notice is not possible, postpones the meeting (without you having to do anything).
Contrast this with the situation where you missed the meeting because it was in Quarantine and client thinks that the email has been delivered to you!
SAFENTRIX approach is practical. Given the ability to white list and the fact that SAFENTRIX talks of “False positive” rates of 1 in less than 300,000 (i.e., for every 300000 emails delivered, less than one False positive occurs), one can be confident the genuine emails will always reach the user.
We need to mention one more thing. The key mentioned in the bounce message is specific to each message. It is an encrypted MD5 Hash of certain parameters of the email. This means that SPAMmer’s will not be able to white list their emails. This approach presents a solid block to SPAMmer’s while allowing the genuine senders through easily.
DID WE MENTION IT IS FREE?
The next big thing about SAFENTRIX is the availability of a Standard Edition, that is fully free. Not in terms of a 30 day trial or in terms of crippled functionality. Standard Edition is a full featured package which is available free for all times. All emails received by Standard Edition users will contain a one line text advertisement (like the one below) as a signature.
—–
STOP SPAM, STOP Virus and SAVE Bandwidth
—–
This could either be an advertisement from SAFENTRIX or one of its clients. SAFENTRIX Clients pay for these advertisements and this revenue is used for operations. That is how the SAFENTRIX Standard Edition is offered free.
So if an organization wants, it can get Email security fully free. Money for that is earned by SAFENTRIX through the one line advertisement appended to each email.
This means that you do not have to worry about the Free Service being discontinued at any point of time.
While this is not a terribly original idea, this is a good option available to the client.
Clients who do not want this advertisement can opt for the Enterprise Edition. Further, within the same organization, you can have Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition users and match costs to your budget.
This means that you can go ahead and deploy SAFENTRIX and still hire the multiple secretaries!
CONCLUSION
With the technical innovation of eliminating Quarantine and the commercial innovation of offering a Free service option, SAFENTRIX brings a fresh approach to an Anti SPAM solution.
In our opinion, it is worth checking out SAFENTRIX for your organization. The evaluation is free. You can try the Standard Edition and upon satisfying yourself with the performance, switch to Enterprise edition (or stay with Standard Edition).
Go ahead and try SAFENTRIX. After all, you have got nothing to lose except your SPAM emails!
Where Spam Comes From
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Tune Up Your Email Newsletter to be Compliant with Anti-Spam Filters
In this article we’ll continue talking about how to create a healthy email message and give a few tips how to survive anti-spam filters. Anti-spam filters catch every incoming email before it is delivered into the inbox and review it. They use a scoring system to classify an email as spam or legitimate. These filters (you might have heard about SpamAssassin, SpamProbe, or SpamCombat) look for certain patterns in the message, and assign “spam points” to it based on certain criteria: words, phrases, or even colors.
Depending on what these filters find or don’t find in the message, points are added to or taken away from a scoring system. If the message score is 5.0 or higher, the filters add the *SPAM* word to the subject line of the message and the email is redirected to a “bulk” or “junk” mailbox. The lesser the score the better.
So, one of the main concerns when writing an email newsletter is to ensure that it is structured in a way that will allow it “pass” this test. I’ll go to the point and give you a few tips you may follow:
1) Check what you put in the subject line
The subject line is one area of your e-mail that is carefully examined. For example, if you type a recipient’s name in the message subject like “To: [recipient's name]“, your message will get 2.86 points because of this. If there is a lot of white space in the subject line, the email gets 2.64 points added to the score. The word FREE written in caps “weighs” additional 1.10 points.
If you put a date into the subject line, you can take off 0.48 points. And you can take one full point off if your subject contains a newsletter header!
2) Keep your message size from 20K to 50K
The size of the message does matter for anti-spam filters. The majority of spam emails are less than 20K. So, you can actually get 0.71 taken from your score if your message in within the 20K to 50K range.
3) Be wise with CAPS
If you use too many capital letters in your message, you’ll get 0.21 points added to your score. So, use them wisely!
4) Use full hyperlinks
If you use a hyperlink in your email, make sure you put the http:// at the beginning. A spam filter will add 1.28 points to your emails if you don’t!
5) Be restrained with colors
Different colors do matter too. Blue adds 0.21 points, red 0.33 points, and Magenta 0.44. The background color other than white adds 0.317 points to the message score. The Black is optimum as it won’t add or take any points off.
6) Be a welcome guest
Send your recipients an e-mail after they have “opted in” at you site, and have them confirm that yes, you have permission to send the newsletters to them. This will help in the case if you need to prove you are not spamming, and that people want to receive the emails from you.
Have your recipients add you to their address books or white lists and your messages won’t have to pass through anti-spam filters.
7) Beware of Blacklists!
Blacklists are databases of known spammers that ISPs regularly check. You may be added to a blacklist without you knowing it if one of your recipients clicks on the “this is spam” button. If you are blacklisted, contact the server provider immediately.
Test your message
Use a spam checker to test your message before you send it out to the world. A message content checker can help locate potential problems prior to distribution. It runs your receiver and sender addresses, subject line, and message content past a collection of rules. It then reports the result and tells you whether your message is likely to be filtered. Most checkers suggest a score of 5.0 will get your email sent to the spam scrap heap. One of our favorite free checkers is the Lyris’ Content Checker. Lyris ContentChecker filters your message through several hundred Spam Assassin tests to determine if it has characteristics typical of unsolicited “spam” mail. Just fill in the blanks, including your email text or the full HTML coding, and submit it. You’ll get an instant score on the next screen and a more detailed report by return email. This report highlights the factors used to evaluate your message, and may help you to make further improvements to it.
9) Don’t use the “spammers” e-mail software
Anti-spam filtering systems are aware of some of the favorite email programs that professional spammers use and they add on as many as 3 points if you send the messages with those program. Be sure to check the ISP’s “hit list” to see what email software are on it. Remember that the anti-spam filters are not perfect and they often happen to be “over protective”. They can give the “false negatives” and “false positives” results after the message analysis. A false negative is when a pure spam email gets through the filter, and a false positive is when a legitimate email ends in the “junk” box flagged as spam.
Around 150 companies now offer spam filtering software. The number of anti-spam techniques is growing and anti-spam technology is getting “smarter” too. For example, some servers (challenge systems) send an email back to the original sender and require a reply before they forward the email to the recipient. The idea behind this is that only a human can reply to a request for specific information. America Online recently announced a new spam filter that can actually “learn” the preferences of each of their subscribers.
Spam – The Internet’s Biggest Virus
We all know that virus’s cause our computers to crash, and unfortunately at times rendering them completely unusable. That’s why we have virus shields and scanners that can take care of these mechanical viruses for the most part. Well there is a virus that has long been attacking the internet itself, and it is not mechanical-it is completely organic and it has a brain. This virus is called a spammer.
Spammers.. viruses? No way, you think… they just send out unsolicited Emails and are extremely annoying.
In the most general sense a virus is a bad thing that is constantly adapting in order to continue attacking, and a vaccine is a good thing that is constantly adapting to mitigate attacks from viruses. If you think about it, web services all over the internet (Google, Spam filters, etc.) are constantly having to adapt and change rules and algorithms to keep spammers on edge-but somehow they manage to get through. Spammers are more than just annoying marketers (or wannabes) that want to fill up your Email inbox.
I often wonder: Are spammers slowly destroying the internet?
Here are my thoughts on that question. Social media and many other web 2.0 services on the internet (social bookmarking/networking, blogs, etc.) are in fact good things. They allow people to express opinions, share useful resources, share lesser-known knowledge, etc. and on the other end of the spectrum other people are able to read opinions, gain more knowledge, visit useful resources, and so on. But as time goes on the amount of genuine content is being far out-weighed by crap content produced by spammers in an attempt to trick search engines, trick users (to gain money), etc.
For example, hundreds (maybe thousands?) of blogs are created each day, but how many actually end up being genuine blogs, and not spam-generated blogs, re-produced content, blogs created for the sole purpose of getting links, etc. Lets look at social bookmarking. There are so many fake accounts are there all linked to one specific person in an attempt to send their website to the top of the rankings. Social networking is the same way along with every other web service/idea both new and old-all are getting plagued by spammers.
However, in the midst of the darkness among all these negatives, there is in fact a light that emerges. I’m a positive thinker, so after giving this subject some thought, I got to thinking about the life expectancy of the so called spam content being mass produced on a daily basis. Not very long. Most spammers probably give it a try for a few days or weeks only to find that their strategies take a lot longer-which narrows down the number of actual spammers that pose a threat to honest bloggers, social networkers/bookmarkers, etc.
So the answer to my question above (Are spammers slowly killing the internet?), I think would have to be a big NO. Search engines are getting better and better at finding the real content and weeding out the crap, and the one’s who usually stick around are genuine web users who are producing valuable content-valuable content meaning real content (someone’s opinion may not seem valuable but it is in fact useful to the overall internet if it is genuine).
If this issue has ever bothered you, such as having thoughts run through your head such as, I’m never going to get a good search engine ranking because there is way too much competition, don’t worry about it because although the numbers tell you there is a rising amount of competition in any certain niche (hard to find a non-saturated niche these days-if you go strictly by the numbers), you have to stop and think of how much actual competition there is. Most people enter a market (many of which are spammers looking for the money) and give up within a few weeks, if not a few days… but their websites, blogs, etc. remain so while it may seem like there is competition, you will actually surpass them very quickly just by being an honest web user that is persistent in whatever niche you are trying to attract traffic within.
The question for this article:
Have you ever felt overwhelmed by competition in a certain niche (whether you were trying to sell something, or just make a blog that will build a readership) but didn’t stop to think how much of that competition was dry spam that isn’t going anywhere?
Don’t Become A Spam Zombie
When I received my first spam message I assumed it was a mistake. Someone had sent the email to me when they meant to send it to someone who’s address was similar. A typo? As spam became more prevalent, the initial thought that someone had got my address and was sending ME messages was hard to get rid of. Somewhere out there there was a person sitting behind a desk, sifting through email lists and deciding what spam to send me today.
Spammers, as I have indicated in several previous articles, are not silly people. Doing what they do, on the scale they do it, takes a degree of competence and expertise well above the average internet user. And the truth is that even if all the spammers in the world had a change of conscience tomorrow and laid down their spam-pens, never sending another message, that spam would continue to flow around the world for some time to come.
The problem is zombies. A zombie is a regular internet user who’s machine has become infected with a trojan that sets up a SMTP application and sends out spam. There are two basic zombie patterns – the zombie forwards mail sent to them by a spammer, or the zombie comes preprogrammed with a spam message and mailing list. In either case the zombie surfer will usually have no idea that they are sending our spam
Spam zombies are usually created from downloading ‘free stuff’ from the internet and in particular peer-to-peer software. Spammers also spread the trojans with their spam itself, and some email clients make this easy by activating scripts within messages. In instances where security settings are low the trojans can be picked up by merely visiting the wrong webpage and allowing certain javascript codes to run.
To avoid becoming a zombie:
1. Always scan anything you download from the internet, and only download from trusted sources.
2. Keep your internet security settings high.
3. Ensure your machine has all the latest updates installed at any point.
4. Regularly scan with an anti-virus AND an anti-Adware program.
5. Employ a quality spam blocker(Such as SpamWasher, avaliable on my site) to protect yourself against viruses transmitted by spam mail.
There is enough spam in the world as it is without your machine turning into a zombie and adding to the problem.
How to Prevent Email Spam
You should have heard much about spam. What exactly spam is? I define spam as something unrequested. For email spam, it is usually advertisement sent by bots to your email address – that is not requested by you. These bots collect emails by various method, and one of the common one is from websites.
Beware when giving out your email address using online forms, they might be one of those agents that collect email address and sell it to third parties. Sometimes, you might also show your email address on social websites profile, like Friendster and MySpace. Showing your email address on websites has a very high risk of being spam.
Do that mean that you can’t share your email address with others? No. You can share it, but in a way that only human will understand, and not bots. I will show you how, but I can’t assure you that it will work. I don’t know how tricky bots nowadays are, so the methods I show might be overcome by those bots.
Play around with symbols
Bot recognize email address by 2 ways, using the “@” symbol and those widely use email domains, like hotmail and gmail. Instead of writing your email address in a proper way like example@gmail.com, you can convert it to example|a|gmail [dot] com. You can then explain it to others so they understand what you mean, like “Please convert |a| to @ and [dot] to “.”. You can convert your email address to anything you feel that is readable by humans, but not bots.
Use image to represent email address
Instead of using text, you can also use images to represent your email address. If you usually spend your online time on community forums or blogs, you might notice them too.
Creating email address image
It is very easy to create such images. You can either do it manually using Photoshop or use a generator for easier task. Here’s some generators:
Email Icon Generator – If you are using free email provider
Safe Mail – If you are using your own domain as email
Mask Email Image Generator – If you are using your own domain as email
Disclaimer: This article is written based on my experience. Some of the facts might not be correct or has been updated. If you found anything wrong, feel free to contact me and let me know.
Don’t Look Spammy!
We all hate spam and get way too much of it – agreed? Now that we have that out of the way it is important to realize that in everyone’s zest to minimize their spam, we are deleting legitimate e-mails – and those e-mail could be YOUR business messages! Two factors are at play – not reviewing your trash before you empty it and sending e-mail with indicators that trip spam filters.
When sending business e-mail, it is critical that you make certain efforts so that your e-mail will not be inadvertently, incorrectly perceived as spam. Several times each day, legitimate e-mail makes its way into my Junk/Trash due to the sender doing or not doing certain things that trigger most spam filters. These are issues you need to be aware of so that your e-mail has its best chance to make it to its intended party.
Your initial contact and making sure your e-mail gives the perception of a serious business entity can make the difference between being read or being trashed. Here is a simple checklist of things you need to put in practice so that your e-mails are not mistakenly identified as spam and deleted before read:
=> Always include an appropriate, short and accurate SUBJECT:. Many times spam does not have a SUBJECT: or it is malformed without appropriate text. Many e-mail programs automatically send subjectless e-mail to Junk/Trash. You also want to avoid using the words: hello, hi, help, new or the recipient’s name or e-mail address as doing so can trigger spam filters.
=> Refrain from using common terms abused by spammers in your subject and/or first paragraph of your email. You know what they are – you see them every day. Many spam filters track these terms and may inadvertently send your email right to Trash.
=> Type your subject with appropriate capitalization and structure. All small case or all caps gives the impression of being spam (and lack of online savvy/education).
=> Make sure your full name, not your e-mail address, is formally displayed in the FROM: field. Example: Jane A. Doe is correct – not jane a doe, or Jane or janeadoe@yourisp.com. FROM: fields with all lower case, only your first name or lack of punctuation indicates a lack of online savvy that is typical of most spammers which signals that your e-mail could also be spam. Not using your last name gives the impression you have something to hide. You always want to use your full and formal name in all business e-mail.
=> Refrain from using any formatting just for the sake of doing so. Formatting can also trigger spam filters if not done properly. Think company letterhead. If you wouldn’t have your name in big, blue, bolded letters on company letterhead do not do it in your business e-mail.
=> Unannounced attachments are viewed suspiciously. Do not send attachments without a specific request to do so and they are expected. If you are going to send attachments over 200K, show extraordinary courtesy and ask the other side FIRST when would be the best time to send your collateral. Then follow through and send it at that prearrange time so the recipient on the other side is available to download your files and keep their inbox clear.
=> When using any sort of spam software or filtering system, before you purge your trash, it doesn’t hurt to take a quick peak to see if any e-mail is in fact from folks you know or recognize.
By keeping the above issues in mind, you have the best chance of your e-mail getting to the person on the other side and for business e-mail that could make the difference between making a sale – or not.