How to Deal with Spam Email
While it is difficult to arrive at exact numbers, it is broadly believed that spam email now represents as much as 40% of all activity on the web. The time employees spend erasing undesirable spam messages is accepted to cost businesses in the United States alone in abundance of $2 billion a year regarding lost profitability.
Obviously spam email messages are a significant issue which must be tended to by system administrators and IT security workers. Various answers for the issue are accessible yet none, unfortunately, give 100% assurance of either eliminating all spam, or guaranteeing that legitimate messages will not be incorrectly categorized as spam.
One solution is to subscribe to email blacklists. These are services which maintain a registry of known spam senders which can be used to isolate spam messages. Unfortunately many spammers send email using the open relays of legitimate email servers thereby disguising their true identity and limiting the usefulness of email blacklists.
Another alternative is to install spam filtering software that blocks spam based on algorithms which scan messages for patterns and word sequences that are common to spam messages. Once again, this solution is only partially effective, resulting in some spam making it through filters and some valid messages being tagged as spam (so called false positives).
A typical and viable approach to take out the volume of spam on the web is for system administrators to shut down mail relaying. Spammers often use programs which scan port 25 (the SMTP port) of systems connected to the internet looking for open relays. Having found an open relay they use this to send vast volumes of spam messages out. Such messages appear to originate from the system with the open relay (almost always a legitimate business with no connections to the spammer) thereby making it difficult to track down the spammer and minimizing the effectiveness of email blacklists.
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