News Munchies
Sick of Spam? Help Is on the Way
Originally Posted
Updated
"The amount of spam has increased more than fourfold during the past year," says Giga Information Group Research Director Jonathan Penn.
We know. We get damn near all of it.
"The content has become more offensive. Spam messages are no longer just innocuous solicitations, but marketing of pornographic material or services. The anti-spam market will develop rapidly in the next 18 months, as content security and anti-virus vendors address this growing problem," Penn says.
"The more tools on the market, the better," says Ray Everett-Church of ePrivacy Group. "The flood of spam has increased so dramatically in the past six or eight months that people who were merely annoyed before are now on the verge of revolution."
A few good spam-fighting tools already exist. net.demon, which bills itself as "the ultimate Internet toolkit" for Windows machines, offers a set of free on-line tools to decode spammers' URLs and Web pages, along with several resource links.
One of spam's ancilliary problems is the tendency of corporate IT departments to block certain email messages. Unfortunately, such "brute force" techniques have the effect of blocking legitimate communications, as well.
If you don't know the company's "magic list" of words to avoid, an innocent message to a colleague may be bounced back to you because the unthinking IT strainer -- just like that editor you hate so much -- arbitrarily decided you should have written something different.
For more information about spam -- unsolicited commercial email -- see our earlier News Munchie, "Spam, Spam, Spam, Egg and Spam!"
We were ticked about spam then, and we still are. "Revolution" is the operative concept.