By Mansi Gupta

One thing that has plagued more or less all the Internet users is Spam. Thus, the biggest ask of todays Internet age is Anti Spam tools.

As the usage of internet is multiplying day after day, e-mail has become the most powerful and desirable means of communication. But some people are trying to annihilate its great reputation by introducing the spam into it. Spam is nothing but unsolicited, unwanted, irrelevant or inappropriate e-mail. They are also known as junk mails. Spam mails are basically aimed at wasting the time and as a result, money of the individuals who are at the receiving end. Many people get annoyed when they see their inboxes full of junk mails, which are hidden between the legitimate ones. This situation may lead to chaos as these people may inadvertently delete the legitimate e-mails while deleting the spam. Also, the spam mails can cause unnecessary burden over the servers by uploading lots of redundant data over them. Moreover, they may even contain viruses, spyware and trojans which can damage the whole system of the receiver.

Hence, people who are acquainted with these ill effects of the spam mails are on the constant look out for better and more advanced Anti Spam solutions to get rid of this menace. Therefore big software companies are continuously trying to develop Anti Spam solutions, spam blockers and e-mail spam filters. Anti Spam solutions are basically designed to check the sender’s name and address and filter the spam e-mails according to a black list of spammers they own. They may also check the recipients’ names and addresses and filter the spam mails according to certain parameters decided by them. Some Anti Spam solutions also use content filtering or Bayesian Logic. They can scan the e-mails and search for certain words or phrases which are common in most spam mails like ‘viagra’ or ‘click here’ and filter the spam e-mails accordingly.

However, these Anti Spam solutions are not infallible. If the software companies are trying to develop more and more advanced ways to block and filter spam, the spammers are also not sitting idle. They are also constantly inventing new ways to hoodwink these Anti Spam programs and cause havoc in the world of internet. Moreover, most of these Anti Spam solutions are not reliable as they may delete some very necessary e-mail taking them as spam. This might happen if a legitimate sender makes use of some of the terms which favorites among the spammers or use an IP address that has been used by spammers in the past. Thus, a reliable Anti Spam solution is one, which minimizes these false positives by adopting a comprehensive anti spam approach by examining both the message content as well as the history of the sender. Moreover, an effective anti spam software is one, which learns the user preferences by analyzing his behavior towards some particular messages. For instance, most of us may delete the messages containing the word ‘viagra’ but some medical organizations may not do so.

Thus, while no Anti Spam software is perfect, still we should use them to reduce the risk of getting plagued by the menace of spam mails.

Mansi gupta recommends that you visit http://www.networksecurityjournal.com/spam_phishing/index.html for more information on Anti Spam.