Spam Filtering
Spam filtering is the last line of defence against spam. By removing the chance of a real person seeing and responding to spam, we reduce the revenue for the spammer. This section presents implementations of spam filtering, resources to help with your filtering, as well as details of spam filtering blacklists and DNSBLs.
Spam Filtering Implementations
Sever side software is useful for those who operate a mail server, client side for email end-users and recipients. Challenge/Response is a way to automatically whitelist new senders - most current implementations are poorly thought through. Be very careful before choosing to use Challenge/Response as a spam filter.
| If you want to filter your own inbox, this is exactly where you need to be. | |
| Rather filter spam before it gets to any inbox? Then you need to go server-side. | |
Challenge/response is an inelegant solution. Even at its best, it transfers the problem of false positives or false negatives to the sender. As such, it is a marketer's dream (100% effective! Try it now!) and a false hope. |
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| Stopping spam from leaving your own network helps your reputation and your system security. |
Spam Filter Listings
| DNS Blackhole Lists (DNSBLs) provide a database which can be queried by DNS; primarily for server side applications, they are now being used in client side implementations. | |
| Blacklists offer much the same service but are used as single-line text records for input into a mail program. |
Spam Filtering Resources
| A clearinghouse of spam filtering research, this page carries links to some resources of true quality. | |
| Particularly with the rise of challenge/response as a spam filtering technology, more is being made of the intellectual property of spam filtering technologies. | |
| Spam is a problem; that much isn't up for discussion. Just how much of a problem it is will become clear from the statistics linked from here. | |
| Anyone using text classification to filter spam will know that testing and design needs a good corpus. These are those public corpora that are known. | |
| Spam filtering almost inevitably raises the ire of those caught in the glare. |
everything you didn't want to have to know about spam
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. SPAM is a trademark of Hormel Foods.
Page last updated: 11-Feb-2009