Spam is universally undesired, although unfortunately not going away anytime soon. The reason for this is simple: individuals earn a substantial amount of money from spam. Due to the sheer volume and pervasiveness of spam emails, the channel has attracted the bulk of technical, commercial, and legislative attempts to stop spammers.

It may seem ridiculous, but spamming can actually be a viable method of earning money. Unlike conventional methods of advertising, sending an email is almost free. Thus enabling someone to send an unlimited quantity, without spending much money at all. One Dutch spammer is currently facing a hefty fine for sending more than 9 billion unsolicited advertisements via email. For a strong ROI (Return On Investment), spammers only need a very small percentage of people to respond. When sending hundreds of thousands of emails daily, they will almost always ensnare a few takers. When you receive a spam email and ask ‘who would actually buy this rubbish?’ know that someone, somewhere has been deceived and made the 800,000 emails sent by the spammer a success.

In 2006 it was estimated that 2.4 billion spam emails were sent EVERY DAY. It is expected that before the end of 2007 this will have increased to more than 3.5 billion*. That is a lot of junk.

Spam is never going to disappear, simply because spammers earn money. What can we do to combat these spam emails? The only option is to apply filters to remove spam, before it floods our inboxes. Unfortunately this is not as easy as ticking the No Spam option in Outlook. It should be noted that blacklisting spam is not an effective blocking method. Blacklisting only blocks the address the message came from and spam almost always uses different addresses for each message, so blacklisting spam will only result in a large and useless list that will slow down the webmail interface. Therefore it is worth taking the time to set filters.

There are a variety of methods used to detect spam messages, for the purpose of filtering them from regular email. The problem is that spammers are constantly finding new ways to get around spam detection. Thus the only effective spam detection system is one that adjusts itself as well as regular updates, to be as current as possible.

The most effective spam detection is tailored specifically to an individual user. The larger and more varied a group that spam detection is serving, the more likely it is to give false-positives (legitimate email incorrectly identified as spam) or miss spam messages. The obvious solution is to run an individually tailored spam detection solution, unfortunately this requires constant updates, maintenance and needs to process all email locally on your computer.

At NetRegistry our solution is to provide a ‘first line of defence’ approach to spam detection. Our system (powered by SpamAssassin) processes all email through the mailserver (before the client even receives it). To avoid incorrectly removing legitimate email our system ‘tags’ spam instead of deleting it. In this way the individual client must decide on how they wish to handle the received spam. Out detection system finds spam and puts a tag at the front of the subject line (*****SPAM*****) while leaving the rest of the message intact. This makes it easy to filter the resultant message.

The advantage of handling detected spam in this way is that the client has the option of either deleting the spam outright or separating it from the main inbox but keeping it (so that it can regularly be checked for false positives).

So how do we filter the email? When NetRegistry’s anti-spam system is enabled spam will be tagged, clients need to filter messages based on these tags. We have outlined the step-by-step process using both NetRegistry’s Webmail interface and Microsoft Outlook.

NetRegistry Webmail:

1. Expand the “Mail” section on the menu to the left of the screen
2. Open the first item on the list, ‘Filters’. This is where we are going to set up our spam filter.
3. Click ‘New Rule’ and name it something like ‘SPAM is irritating’. Ensure the ‘All of the following’ option is selected.
4. Select the subject field as the target of our filter, make the rule as follows: SUBJECT contains *****SPAM*****
5. Decide where to send the spam, either select ‘Delete message completely’ (which will be permanent and mean any false positives will result in legitimate email being lost) or ‘Deliver to folder’. If you select the delete option, click ‘Save’. If you wish to move the spam to a folder, simply select an existing folder or create a new one (naming it SPAM or JUNK). Then select save.
6. In the filter list, tick ‘Enabled’ on the right of the screen, illustrating the rule is in effect (simply click to turn a rule on or off).
7. By default, that rule will only run when you select the ‘Apply Filter’ button
8. To run filters during log in, use the drop down selection on the top left of the screen to edit options for mail. Select ‘Filters’ and check the box under ‘Filter Options’ to apply filter rules when logging in. Hopefully, you will never see the spam.

Spam filters in Outlook:

1. In your inbox and select Tools -> Rules Wizard
2. Create a New Rule, select ‘Check messages when they arrive’ and click Next.
3. In the conditions list select ‘with specific words in the subject or body’. This will create the condition, to set the option click the ‘specific words’ link (in blue).
4. Enter *****SPAM***** as the word and click OK.
5. Click Next and determine what to do with the spam messages. Permanently delete the spam emails, or move them to another folder. If you select to another folder, click on the link and select the folder, or create a new one, to store the spam.
6. When finished, click Next and name the rule. Exceptions can be created, though this generally will not be necessary.

If you require assistance setting up the filters, simply speak to one of our operators by calling the NetRegistry Customer Service Team on 1800 78 80 82.65 Although spam is annoying, there is no way of removing it altogether. An anti-spam system, combined with a suitable filter, will minimise the amount we actually need to process. For more information, visit

http://spam-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/spam-statistics.html