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[E354]Exchange 2003 Spam Filtering

by Harish Chib, Har

"44,000 pieces of time-wasting, bandwidth eating, server clogging spam a day. That's 1,338,363 pieces of spam in a month. And a crazy 16,060,365 spam mails in an entire year. That's one man's spam in UK ? of the highest spam recipient. This tally from ClearMyMail shows the spam problem. It took him 2 hours to wade through the lottery, Nigerian scam and unwelcome organ enlarging solicitations.

What couldn't I do with those 2 hours. Get my butt on the seat and get the final draft of the article out, answer my 5-year old's interminable questions all the way to Domino's, through dinner and back, and more such things that I avoid - all without a tenth of the eye-glazing boredom that deleting spam induces in me. And without the fear of deleting a legitimate mail while suffering from the glaze.

And it happens in organizations too. We did a survey in organizations a while ago. They were deploying firewall and anti-virus by default, but when it came to anti-spam, they weren't overly concerning themselves with having the best solution around, sometimes none at all. But there's more to spam than just a load of junk in our inboxes. What we see as a time-waster, is also the carrier of threats, breaching security defenses in networks. Phishing, spyware, viruses, you name it, they arrive with nerve-racking regularity. Even for the trained eye, some of these are deceiving, changing tactics so fast and coming up with novel ways to drive themselves into inboxes that by instinct we click on them before our mental alerts start kicking in. That's what I did when pdf spam first arrived. Luckily, it had been just another pump and dump scheme.

I hate to give conclusions, sounds like so much thesis, but here I go with this one ? that anti-spam is as important as firewall and anti-virus. And not just any anti-spam solution. One that gets to the spam before you do. Which means, it cannot wait for signatures. It cannot rely on content scanning. It must see the pattern of distribution. Look for one that goes beyond content. But first look for one ? to add to your firewall, anti-virus, anti-spyware arsenal ? to begin with."

For most of us, changing our primary email address to get rid of spam is not really an option. This is because our email addresses are known and used by many of our contacts and may also be printed on business cards and other material. We certainly don't move to a different residence because of some junk mail in our letter boxes. Luckily, there are some very effective ways to combat spam and one such was is using a Spam filtering tool.

The particular tool that I am referring to is called MailWasher. It is a tool that I cannot do without. I've been using it for about 2 years now and my running totals shows that 72% of emails received are automatically deleted by Mailwasher. For more product information on Mailwasher, please visit: www.BSDRegister.com/products/mailwasher

Mailwasher is a piece of software that works at the source i.e. it connects directly to your inbox on the server and takes care of emails there. This is very different to using email filters in your email software for example Outlook or Thunderbird. The major difference is that Mailwasher wipes out emails on the email server so that you never have to download them. Having a filter in Outlook would mean that the email has to first be downloaded onto your computer and then examined and dealt with accordingly. For those messages spreading viruses, this could well pose a threat.

Mailwasher is easy to setup and takes a few minutes. There is a 30-day free trial of the software so that you can have ample time to decide if it is working for you. Initially, I started setting up my own spam filters and was having some success, but then I stumbled upon a link on the company's website that pointed to a link where an avid user was offering his filters for free. I downloaded those and installed them and have never look back. The amount of spam that was identified started to steadily increase until the 72% level that it is at today. This means that on average, 3 of every 10 eamils I receive are legitimate and are allowed through by Mailwasher. The rest are deleted at the source and I don't have to spend time downloading them. This is a big deal if you are using dialup access to the Internet.

There are many controls within the software. You can specify emails be deleted automatically without your knowledge or you could have the program mark them for deletion but let you glance at them just in case. This is useful initially until you get a good feel for it. There are many other options that fall in between these. The good thing is that they are all on one screen.

There is a concept of a blacklist and a whitelist. You can import all of your address book from Outlook with a couple of clicks and from other email programs as well. These go into what is called a whitelist. Mailwasher will allow all emails through that are on the whitelist. It will mark or automatically delete all those that are on the blacklist. Adding or removing someone from either list is a very simple point and click exercise.

Mailwasher also allows the setting up of legitimate filters. These are methods of specifying an email as legitimate. For example, if you identify all emails coming from your company domain name as being legitimate, then all messages from your coworkers will be allowed through without you having to specify each person. This is achieved using a wildcard setting such as "*@youworkdomain.com". This can also be used to blacklist an entire domain such that all messages are immediately marked for deletion or automatically deleted depending on your settings.

MailWasher is an independent program and does not interfere with your email software. It sits in the system tray and does its work diligently. In my case, it checks my inbox every 10 minutes and does a cleanout. I have my email software setup to only retrieve messages when I instruct it to so that MailWasher has the most opportunity to do it's work.

Mailwasher also has more advanced controls, one of them being something known as "Origin of Spam". There are servers on the internet which list known spam addresses. When you receive a message from one of these addresses, it is automatically marked as spam and deleted without your filters even being invoked. This is a remarkable system and comes free with MailWasher. A whopping 14% of emails that I get are identified in this manner and automatically deleted.

MailWasher is an indispensable tool in my email arsenal. If spam is a problem for you, it could do likewise for you. Download your free trial today and use it for 30 days. If you like it, you only pay $37 which in my book is a small price to pay for so much time saved everyday.

Article Source : Linksys Wireless Broadband Router

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Both Harish Chib & Balraj Dhaliwal are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Harish Chib has sinced written about articles on various topics from Online Security, Broadband and Home Security. "Harish Chib is the VP (New business development) Cyberoam. For more information on Cyberoam, visit these pages -. Harish Chib's top article generates over 1600 views. to your Favourites.

Balraj Dhaliwal has sinced written about articles on various topics from Broadband, Computers and The Internet. . Balraj Dhaliwal's top article generates over 1600 views. to your Favourites.