"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket" - George Orwell (SpamNet - Cloudmark)

Member Name: ILoveJackDaniels

Product:	SpamNet - Cloudmark
Date:	18/07/02 (808 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No more spam, Easy to use, Free

Disadvantages: Compatibility with a range of email programs is lacking

It's amazing what people will do on the internet to try and make a quick buck. Thousands and thousands of people are doing their level best every day, using every means at their disposal, to get you to visit their site. And not just you, the millions of other net users whose every action earns the webmaster another fraction of a penny are targetted - all of us.

Some of these people are perfectly reasonable. They rely on their content, combined with a degree of moderate, fairly inoffensive adverts, to entice you to their site and make you stay. Others are not so scrupulous, utilising everything from javascripts that popup windows when you leave a site to the visual basic script used by passthison.com (DO NOT visit this site), amongst others, to change your homepage and prevent you from ever changing it back.

These are the people whose sites rarely have worthwhile or memorable content, and rely on force to drag enough visitors in to ensure they make money from the huge amounts of advertising they invariably contain. This group includes the insidious and irritating scum we know as spammers.

Spam is a difficult thing to define, as everyone has their own opinion of what constitutes it. The main descriptions you will hear on the net describe spam as Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) and Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE). In my opinion, spam is that collection of 100 or so emails I had to filter out every morning before I could see what real mail I had received. The messages offering to increase my bust size, telling me I'd won competitions I've never entered, that I can earn millions working from home now, and even offering to sell me a CD with millions of email addresses on that I can spam myself are a few examples of the type of thing you will all have seen.

It is a problem, and an increasing one. At the moment, the average net user receives something like 700 spam emails a year, or 2 a day on average. Internet users like myse
lf, with over 30 addresses and several websites, can easily average 40,000 spam messages a year, with others even higher that that! According to Jupiter Media Metrix, the amount of Spam we receive will continue to go up, and will account for about 43% of ALL email by 2006. The average net user will be getting 1400 messages a year on average by then.

The worst part of it all is the cost. It takes time to filter this rubbish, and that's time you're wasting every day. Time you could be spending being more productive at work, or playing even more Half-Life. If you are on a dial-up modem, it takes time to download this junk, and who pays for that? You do, of course. If you're not on dial-up, you still foot the bill for a portion of this advertising you didn't ask for and don't want, to cover your ISP's costs for the bandwidth used to deliver them. And the spammer? He pays the same. Unless he's just using AOL's one month free offer or something similar, in which case he pays nothing.

So what is there to do about it? Is there a solution? Well, yes, there are options. Some people simply send the messages to the abuse and postmaster addresses of the ISP allowing the spammer to access the net and send the email. Some people use filters that detect certain words or addresses and delete messages from those addresses. Some use programs like mailwasher, that bounce mail sent my spammers to give the impression an email address is invalid and hopefully it will then be removed from the spam lists.

There are problems with these systems. ISPs normally will disconnect a spammer once they have been informed of their actions, however it is normally too late by then to do anything, as the messages are sent, and the vermin normally then go on to use another dial-up account (very easy to come by and use) to continue their irritation. Filters are inaccurate, normally, missing a lot of spam and filtering out authentic messages. Spamme
rs quickly change their messages to avoid these filters too. Programs like mailwasher are great, except that it is very rare that a spammer would bother to remove an address from a list. Clicking a 'remove me from this list' link in a spam mail is also a very bad idea, as all that normally does is confirm that the address is a valid one, and the quantity of spam you get is likely to increase.

It all seems pretty bleak for us poor netizens. ISPs are getting lazier - the spammers are after all paying for their service, and nobody wants to lose a paying customer in these harsh times. Spammers are getting more creative. If only there was some way to harness the power and anger of the masses who are beleaguered day after day by the mountains of crap building up in the email boxes. If only someone would come up with such a system....

Enter Napster. Napster, as I'm sure you are all aware, ran as a peer to peer program, meaning that through a central server, one computer could share information with any other computer connected to the same network. Napster's co-founder, John Ritter, together with Vipul Ved Prakash, creator of the open source Razor network spam filter, have come up with the bright idea of combining the technology behind Napster and Razor and the frustration of the net users to create an extremely innovative and effective anti-spam tool, SpamNet.

It really is rather simple. All you have to do to use it is ensure first you are using Microsoft Outlook (Not Outlook Express, though a version is on the way for that and other email clients may be included later). Visit the website at http://www.cloudmark.com, download a small plugin, run it (very quick and easy), and you are done. Simple.

It changes Outlook around a little for you. First and foremost you will notice 2 new buttons at the top of Outlook saying 'Block' and 'Unblock'. You will also see a Spam folder on the left of your screen. Going in
to the options menu you will also see a new SpamNet tab, allowing you to set a few simple options and see the current statistics for SpamNet.

Whenever you receive an email, it will be scanned by the program. SpamNet will determine whether or not it is spam, and if it is it will be moved to the Spam folder. If not, it will be left alone. If you receive a spam message that is not filtered out, select it and click on block. If a message is accidentally filtered out that should not have been, select it and click on unblock, and it will be added to a local (as in, on you computer) white list, meaning any more messages from the same source will be allowed through.

When you click on Block is when it gets really clever. It sends a message to Cloudmark's central server identifying that unique message as spam. If enough users click on Block, then that message will automatically be filtered out by SpamNet from then on. It means that however creative the spammers get, their newest spams will soon be identified and blocked. As the network of users grows, so will the effectiveness of the software, with newer spam being identified faster, and less spam received on average by each member of the network.

With 25,000+ people already involved, and still growing fast, SpamNet is looking like it could be the ray of light we've all been hoping for. Whatever the spammers do, they can't avoid it, and they will soon go out of business. The tide could be turning, ladies and gentlemen, and it is down to the bright idea of a select few people - the lovely folk at Cloudmark.

As with everything else, there are certain downsides. It isn't perfect, yet. As with all spam filters, it does miss the occasional message and filter out the occasional authentic one. The percentages are much better than with other filters though. I tested it out (straight after getting it) on a folder filled with spam (my Deleted Items folder, as it happens), and it filt
ered out all but 12 of about 210 messages.

It is also only available for Outlook at the moment, which is another gripe I have. I much prefer Outlook Express, as do many others, and there is no version for Outlook Express available yet. Other email clients may well be supported later, but unfortunately users of Hotmail, AOL, Eudora et al will have to wait a while longer, if they ever release versions for these platforms at all (If you use Outlook Express, I recommend you visit the site anyway and join the mailing list - you'll then be notified when they release an Outlook Express compatible version).

Overall this has to be by far and away the most effective Spam filter I have ever seen, and I have tried a fair few. All of them, actually, as far as I know. It is ridiculously easy to install and use, and makes virtually no difference to my system performance or the speed of Outlook. It's a great idea, and I hope if you use Outlook you will adopt it.

Goodbye, "Free Award Confirmation", "Instant Quotes", "Best Loan" and "Play with me" emails. I'd love to say I'll miss you, but that would be a lie.

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