NexGen Business, IT Support, IT Maintenance, Servers, Networks, Anti-spam services

Spam and Anti-Spam Scanning and Filtering for Businesses

Spam comes in many forms - from the innocuous to the downright fraudulent - but all of them are responsible for wasting time, increasing costs, directly, or indirectly, and decreasing confidence in the use of electronic mail, and the Internet as a whole. Spam is typically unsolicited advertising, perhaps for apparently "legitimate" products - healthcare products, computer software and, of course, pornography are popular subjects for spam - but perhaps also sent with the intention of maliciously infecting a computer with a virus, or Trojan horse, or "phishing" for confidential information, such as bank details.

Effects of Spam & Solutions

Spam is a problem for businesses of all sizes. This includes the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), themselves, who experience increased operational costs - in terms of bandwidth, and storage capacity - resulting from spam, and must pass those costs on to their customers. With an estimated 70%, or 80%, of the email traffic circulating around the globe being spam, it is easy to appreciate just what an overhead this represents. In a typical business, spam presents email recipients with the problem of wading through individual email accounts, to identify what is legitimate email, and what is not. This is, of course, totally unproductive, but minor in comparison to the potential effects of phishing; if an individual, or employee, divulges bank details to a spammer, funds may be taken fraudulently, and the process of recovering them lengthy, and costly, if, indeed, they can be recovered at all.

Spam filtering, of some description, is therefore a necessity in modern business. Spam filters typically rely on a combination of word lists, containing words commonly associated with spam, and so-called "blacklists" and "whitelists", which contain the IP address - the unique identifying number assigned to every computer connected to the Internet - of each known source of spam and legitimate mail messages, respectively. Spammers are wise to the word list technique and may deliberately misspell keywords in the subject line, or body of the message - substituting the figure "0" for the letter "o" is a common ruse - to avoid spam filtering, without losing the overall meaning of the message. This means that lists must be maintained on a regular basis. Spam filtering software and service providers have become more sophisticated in their methods of preventing spam, but this does mean that "false" positives are increasingly likely.

Some ISPs are better than others at dealing with spam, so it is worth your while to compare broadband providers, for example, before committing to one or another. Independent surveys and reports into precisely this area of service provision are carried out and published periodically, and may reveal unexpected differences - perhaps 15%, or more - between the abilities of even the major providers to reduce spam.