As everyone knows, spam takes a mighty toll on productivity. There's nothing like coming into the office on a Monday morning and wading through hundreds and hundreds of spam e-mail messages to start the day. Dealing with spam usually takes two forms, depending on whether you're in the office or at home. Let's talk about the office first.
In my office, we use Lotus Notes. At first, the IT guys took care of spam by filtering it out all on their own. I couldn't tell we had a spam filter at all, since I was receiving lots of spam. But I was assured that at least 80% of the spam was indeed being caught before it reached my mailbox. But it seemed that there were quite a few complaints of legitimate e-mails being caught in the filter, and so the company switched to another program.
I’m not sure what program it was, but it did something similar to what Norton's anti-spam software does, I started getting messages with "Maybe Spam" embedded in the subject line. The purpose of this, I think, was to be a little more lenient in allowing spam through, so that the legitimate stuff didn't get filtered out. There were two problems with this: 1. there was no feedback mechanism that I can remember to make the software learn right and wrong, and 2. whenever you replied to a message, the recipient got the "Maybe Spam" message, which caused some confusion on the recipient’s part. After about a year or so, this program was dumped, and then we moved on to what I consider the worst of all.
The current corporate spam filter, called the Personal Message Manager from ClearSwift, catches spam, as it is supposed to. Then after a while, you get an email from them telling you to check your spam, just in case some legitimate messages were caught. When you click on the link in the email, you are taken to their site and asked to sign in. After you do this, you are presented with pages and pages of spam to sift through. Each time you get to the end of the page, you have to click to go to the next page, which takes several seconds or more to load. There are checkboxes to check off the good emails as I recall, so that the company can send them to your email box. This ridiculous procedure took so long that I opted out of it after a month or so.
Now I'm left with nothing but the Rules folder of Lotus Notes to combat the mountains of spam I get every day. So I figured I would make a game out of it. I added a few rules here and there and checked how I was doing. Adding rules to Lotus Notes, at least the version my company uses (version R5) is very slow, which takes some of the fun out of the game. I timed it as five seconds to get into the application and ten seconds to add one rule.
Here's how I'm doing so far. Over one recent weekend, I caught 485 spam messages while 201 got through to my inbox for a catch percentage of about 70%. Of course, I have to check the captured spam for any real mail (so-called false positives), which unlike the ClearView system, goes very fast, since all my captured spam goes into a SPAM folder. In this case, no real messages were thrown in the SPAM folder. I did one other test of the system, over the recent Thanksgiving extended weekend. In this test, I caught 1,094 spam messages, while 442 got through, again a little over 70%. But this time, seven real messages were dumped into the SPAM folder, which equates to about 0.4%.
I'm not happy with this 70% figure. In fact, I think it stinks. So I went looking around the Internet for some suggestions. The software companies that sell spam filters try to catch spam directly, but also try to create a "white list" or "friends" list, which makes sense. To do this using a rules-based procedure means you have to create another folder, a second inbox so to speak. For some reason, with Lotus Notes, this doesn't work on a consistent basis. I read somewhere that Notes can only process about ten rules, so that may be the problem. Keep in mind that you can have many logic conditions per rule.
You can try the same rule-based procedures at home, but on your own machine you have more options, like purchasing anti-spam software for yourself. The one I'm most interested in trying is a product called Qurb, from Computer Associates, which claims to block 100% of spam. Now that's a number I can live with. For what it's worth, the product won a PC Magazine Editor's Choice award.
Let's look at a couple more things. Another way to block spam is through the use of Bayesian filters. A long time ago, I studied Bayes theorem, but I'm not exactly sure how to use it to block spam. As I recall, Bayes theorem is used to calculate conditional probabilities. This technique, I think, is more of a tool for the guys who write anti-spam software than for someone trying to use the rules approach. Also, I've been using rules to catch words in the subject area of an e-mail almost exclusively. You can also use the sender or the body.
That about wraps up the description of my attempt to deal with spam. Now here are some thoughts. Products like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office have to start incorporating spam filters. IBM and Microsoft have to stop acting like this problem doesn't exist or is not their problem. Why isn't there a button in these products that makes it easy to create a "friends" list or another button to denote a spam message? Please don't let me find out that both of these products have this feature in their latest releases, but my company is a release or two behind.
Finally, wouldn't it be nice if a company could add the rules for you, through some back-end process for Lotus Notes or similar program. After all, the productivity losses caused by spam certainly are a good reason to do this. I'm sure a guy in IT who is a Lotus Notes expert could do a better job at blocking spam than I can. And then I wouldn't have to waste any further time on the problem.
I'm sure there are some readers out there who have tried to tackle this problem. How are you doing at the spam game? I'd like to know.
Reader Comments
I have the same problem with Lotus at work. At home I use Mozilla Thunderbird, where you mark messages as "junk" and it learns from the content to move new messages automatically. Works pretty well-- a lot better than the server gateway that's filtering legitimate messages...
Anonymous -December 05, 2007 (Article Rating:  )
personally i think that this article had no use to me or my fellow article readers infact this particular article was quite honestly disgraceful and I would be ash-amed to be the author of of this artilce. yours sincerly Dennis Brockword.
Dennis Brockword -August 01, 2007 (Article Rating:  )
Until a better system comes around, I prefer the white/black list method. Of the hundreds of spam I get a day, I have had only had one spammer ever bother to request to be added to my white list. Many legit senders complain about the process, but I figure that if it is really that important to contact me via my e-mail, it is the least they can do. They only have to go through the process once. What's the big deal? I do try to remember to add someone if I am emailing them for the first time. Since I am initiating the correspondence, it is the courteous thing to do.
Anonymous -June 26, 2006 (Article Rating:  )
We are using Yahoo as our front end spam filter and it is catching about 80% of the spam. The spam goes in a BULK folder and the 'non-spam' goes into the INBOX and we download to our computer from there with a POP3. The secondary email filter is Mozilla Thunderbird and we have not yet activated that filter yet. We basically quickly peruse both our INBOX and BULK folders each day (we get about 200 emails a day), mostly deleted all the BULK and prunning out the few (about 10-20%) in the INBOX that are really spam.
The false positives (i.e. emails called spam in the BULK that are NOT spam) are about 1% - I still check them all by eyeballing the list. Pretty easy to catch the bad ones that way. Still stupid stuff gets by the Yahoo spam filter - stuff that should be obvious. I think a multilevel approach is needed - a Baysian filter, a sophistical rules filter (e.g. if the subject line has non-printable ASCII, it is spam) and a list of acceptable senders (with some wildcard capabilities so I can always get emails from my email lists).
Bob Groh -March 26, 2006
My company has just purchased Spam Bully and I have to say it is an absolutely excellent product. I tried and tested a few products before recommending SpamBully. SpamBully was by far the best. It works with Exchange accounts, that is very important for us. The very first time you start Spam Bully, its Bayesian spam filter will learn from your own personal email habits, identifying good and spam messages. Every time you download your email, Spam Bully will make sure good emails make it to your Inbox. Spam emails are sent to the "Spam" folder. Emails SpamBully may have difficulty classifying, go to a special "Unsure" folder. You can always adjust emails in these folders by using the Spam and Not Spam buttons in the SpamBully toolbar. Tons of features and worth a look.
John R. -January 13, 2006
My web server who hosts my email offered me something new last year. It is a web based, spam challenge system that automatically returns an email to any sender and requires them to follow a web link that confirms that they are real. They started catching 100% of my spam and few people were confused about the web link that automatically puts them on my white list as does sending them an email. It had nothing to do with my address book only that spammers don't usually check their return emails. The few that have and followed the reality check http-page could then be illiminated by email address filtering in my email program. This is usually less than one per day rather than over 100. I have a web portal that allows me to go to see the quaranteened emails even before they reply to the challenge or if I'm looking for an automated message that won't get through unless I manually allow it. I do run S-proxy pro also that further cathes spam by rule filtering and places it in my deleted box but it has not been busy since implementing the Spam Challenge. The web software allows a lot more control but I've been happy with it as it automatically populates a white list then sends your real emails to any type of email program you want. Good luck. If you email me you will see what I mean. Happy New Year.
DJ -January 03, 2006 (Article Rating: )
Actually, Outlook has some entry level spam filters. In 97 it was a feature that was available only if you had an Exchange Server; Inbox Assistant, as I remember. In Outlook 2000 there are the menu items Actions-Junk E-mail-Add to Junk Senders or Add to Adult Senders. The problem with this is spammers change their addresses every day to thwart such efforts.
At home, I have Cox Internet and I don't know how they do it, other than aggressive filtering and constant updating of known spammers, but I get maybe 10 spams on a BAD day.
As far as I am concerned, the best spam filter is one that treats all email as spam unless it is from an entry in your address book. In order to make this work, you have to update the address book and the server has to be able to handle legit email that you haven't added yet. It goes like this. Every email that comes in that isn't in your address book gets an automatic reply (I like doing that to spammers) telling them that if they really want to send you an email, they have to reply to the email with a specific address or keyword in the subject. It will then notify you that their email address wants to send email and you need to add them to the address book. This guarantees 100% blocking, except in the case of spammers who collect valid email addresses and use them to spoof their from address. But I only get those occasionally. It also guarantees all valid email gets through. And, if we all did it, every spammer would get hammered with the auto replies when they sent out a new batch.
Dave M. -December 19, 2005 (Article Rating: )
I have Lotus Notes at work and have about the same experience as yours. IT must have had a filter on for a while because it got much better, then it suddenly got bad again, although not as bad as without anything. I also have rules checking and it might get rid of the obvious ones, but probably not much compared to a good blocker. I have SBC Yahoo at home and it stops at least 95% of the spam, so I would rate it as good. It also has a list of friends, so they always get through. So at work, where I should be productive it sucks, at home it is OK.
Anonymous -December 19, 2005
I use Eudora (paying version)and it has a junk folder. It catches most of the spam. Apart from some bugs (crashes the mail directory sometimes) I am very happy with it. That bug is supposed to be fixed in the next revision.
Good article, I used Lotus Note a fewyears ago and I hated it.
Anonymous -December 16, 2005
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