Anti-Spam White Paper:
The purpose of this document is to discuss issues and problems associated with spam email, describe available technologies to fight spam and explain how eSafe unique solutions can fight spam.
The Email and Anti-Spam Problem:
Unsolicited commercial email, commonly referred to as spam, is growing rapidly and is finding its way to desktops both in the home and in the office. The major impact of spam is on ISPs that must cope with increasing amount of email traffic. Businesses are also suffering from spam attacks that affect their infrastructure and productivity.
Spam is commonly compared to paper junk mail. However the difference is that junk mailers pay a fee to distribute their materials, whereas with spam the recipient or ISP pays in the form of additional bandwidth, disk space, server resources, and lost productivity. If spam continues to grow at the current rate, the spam problem may become unmanageable in the near future.
According to Jupiter Research, in 2001, U.S. consumers received over 140 billion 'spam' e-mails and since then the average amount of spam per user has increased from 3.7 to 6.2 emails per day. They predict that by 2007 spam email will increase significantly, reaching more than 645 billion messages. This means the average Internet user will receive up to 3,900 spam messages a day! Even if an individual can delete one spam messages every second it would still take one hour every day to manually remove spam.
In a study done by Ferris Research in January 2003 they have quantified the annual cost of spam: $8.9 billion for U.S. corporations, $2.5 billion for European businesses and another $500 million for U.S. and European service providers. The cost comes from loss of productivity, consumption of IT resources and the helpdesk cost.
Ferris also tried to predict the future of the email spam and according to this study, there will on average be 41 spam emails per user per up from 10 in 2003.
Legal Issues for Anti-Spam:
Twenty-six U.S. states and sixteen European countries have some sort of law restricting or banning unsolicited email, according to the www.spamlaws.com web site.
Internet service providers, for example, have met with significant successes on the anti-spam legal battlefield. For example, in April 2002 AOL Time Warner's America Online unit, won an injunction and secured a "significant" monetary settlement against a spammer, while EarthLink secured a more than $24 million judgment in a comparable case.
Unfortunately those legal actions clearly failed to stop spammers from sending unsolicited emails.
There are several techniques to fight spam; none can completely eliminate spam without blocking any legitimate email as well. However, using a combination of techniques, spam can be reduced to the lowest possible minimum and yet not block legitimate email.
Let's look at a typical spam message and examine the methods used to identify and block it.
eSafe employs a combination of techniques to combat spam. Some of the methods used are available as part of the eSafe?s Advanced Anti-spam Service.
Explained here are spam and methods:
Real-time black lists
This technique, commonly referred to as RBL (real-time black-hole lists), checks the incoming IP address against various Black Lists to verify that the sending server is not listed as an open mail relay that spammers can use to relay their unsolicited emails.
Normally any secure mail server should refuse to relay (send) email from an external sender to anybody outside its domain. This ensures that spammers cannot hijack it and use it to send spam that will look like it is coming from a legitimate mail server. Unfortunately some system administrators, for whatever reason, fail to configure their mail servers to block such a relay.
