The SPAM Filter Toolbar for Outlook is a plug-in for your mail client. This will give you the option to select multiple messages and report them as SPAM. This is an ongoing effort to improve our filtering processes and rid your Inbox of SPAM. This Toolbar may not work as intended if you use only Microsoft Exchange (without POP3 mail also). If you use Exchange, please forward your messages (as attachments) to reportspam@agnitek.com instead. Please see more details above in the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).

I recently received an email from one of our customers asking about the very low moral content of spam emails being received, why they receive more and more spam overtime, what they can do to help reduce the amount of spam received and options regarding AgniTEK's new spam email filter. I response, I have written the following article to help demystify some the spam mail system.

So, how can spammers send me email that I don't want and what is being done to prevent it? Unfortunately the nature of the email system protects senders allowing them to send whatever they want to whoever they want. The internet community as a whole is fighting back against these individuals for a number of reasons. One reason which you have already seen is that honest customers receive unsolicited advertising much of which is well below the moral standard. Another reason is that the latest statistics show 75%-80% of all mail traffic on the internet is spam. It is expensive to maintain the cable and hardware that makes the internet possible, so it is extremely cost inefficient to have so much worthless data being sent back and forth. As companies like ours develop new strategies to combat spam, spammers develop new methods to locate recipients and send emails. 

With even the most conservative personal practices of protecting your address, overtime you will steadily receive more spam mail. Spammers execute dictionary attacks where they combine every possible combination of letters and numbers sending spam email to each one. Eventually, your address comes up. Spammers are also working with virus and spy ware authors so that compromised machines can look in your email software for email addresses and report them back to the spammer. Even large companies who retain your email address for legitimate purposes have been compromised resulting in spammers getting everyones address.

As a result of the value of known email addresses increases, an entire industry of email address commerce has sprung up. The advertisers selling the unthinkable things you see in your spam continue to get sales and as they do, they increase the number of ads sent to potential customers. Since most spammers are guessing at addresses, the value of not knowing whether the address is good or not makes the addresses worth hundredths of a cent to other spammers. If you were to receive a spam email with a message at the bottom allowing you to unsubscribe as many do, you might be tempted to click it have yourself removed from the list. By clicking the link, you alert the spammer that someone is reading the email at the address they sent to, and now your email address is worth as much as a dollar when sold to other spammers. A spammer with a few hundred known good addresses will sell them to every spammer buying making a few thousand dollars in the process. In this respect never give any indication to any spam email that you are receiving their message. You may have noticed that Microsoft Outlook blocks images in emails. For the same reason, spammers include a little tag on images so when you open the email and your computer downloads the image, the spammer would know that someone is looking at the email and they store your address as more valuable.

Until some new system is developed, there will be a push and pull relationship between more strict spam practices and more important emails being caught and incorrectly marked as spam. Our previous spam mail system although efficient, marked too many good messages as spam and resulted in customers not being able to communicate inter-office and with their clients and customers. Over the past month we have implemented a new spam filter which has been far more successful at catching spam and avoiding false positives than any other system we have tried. The upside is that most spam mail is caught before being delivered to your email box; the downside is that you must look through a daily spam digest to make sure the filter did not catch anything important. The new system is not perfect as there is no such thing, but we feel it vastly better targets spam mail and keeps good emails being delivered to your inbox.

If I don't want to look through a daily digest from AgniTEK but still receive a lot of spam, what else can I do? There are only two other solutions I can think of to alleviate your situation. One would be to change your email address, it would take a month or two for spammers to get your new address maybe longer if you never enter it anywhere online and only give it out verbally. This is not fool proof and if any one who knows your address gets a virus or spy ware, your address will be compromised and you will begin receiving spam again. The other would be to change your digest to weekly so you only have to download one a week. This would keep the spam filter running but reduce the amount of time you spend downloading digests.

I know this is disappointing and believe me, I wish I had a fool proof solution because I would be a wealthy man. This is the nature of email at this time and as more informed people like you begin to understand the complications more can be done to combat it.

Kevin Crenshaw
Internet Services Manger
AgniTEK

Are you or your company receiving a large amount of spam email? If so, please contact us to learn more about how AgniTEK can reduce the amount of spam getting to your inbox making email communication more efficient.