-by Sid Hale

Like everyone, I've wrestled with the SPAM issue on a number of fronts.  

I have multiple email addresses for each of three different businesses.  I have a personal email address for each, a support address for each, an editor address for two of the three, and then, of course, sales, info, and webmaster addresses for all three.

Probably unlike most, I archive every single piece of in-coming and out-going email, and have for the past nine years.   Well, except for the pure junk...

Maybe someday I'll explain all the reasons I do that, but let me get back on topic.

This time last year, I was receiving the occasional SPAM, but it was only 20 or 30 a day, and manageable - a mild frustration.  Today, I receive 500-600 per day, and it's costing me money!

Let me explain.  

Whether you charge for your time as a consultant, develop products to sell, or simply sell other people's products as an affiliate, your business doesn't make money without the investment of time.  Even if you have a stable of products that other people sell for you, you probably spend time trying to identify or create your next product.

Any time you spend dealing with SPAM, is money out the window.

We've seen many attempts to thwart SPAM in as many different ways.  We've seen entire companies formed with the intent of "licensing" the right to have email pass through the big ISP's (wouldn't that really give anyone with enough money, guaranteed delivery of their SPAM messages?).  We've seen services that required confirmation from anyone emailing us so that they could be "white-listed".  We've seen desktop email filtering solutions, and email client plug-ins.  Many of us have had email we wanted to receive censored by our own ISP - based on their determination of what constitutes SPAM.  

We all watched the California SPAM law become toothless, as it was almost totally superceded by the U.S. Federal law (CAN-SPAM) that went into effect at the first of the year.

It's been a real soap opera, and it's not over yet.  

I've personally seen junk mail increase since the passage of CAN-SPAM.  Without some heavy fines and jail time for the perpetrators, it's not going away any time soon - so I think we've just got to find the best filtering solutions we can, and deal with the problem ourselves.

I've avoided writing on this topic for two reasons.

1. Everyone else was.  You didn't need my opinions lumped on top of all the others I'm sure you were reading.  I was getting tired of the whole subject.  

2. I didn't really have any good answers.  I just couldn't be of much help!  Now I think I can.

The best filtering solution I've seen yet (and I've used three different methods before now) has just been released.  It's called SpamBlitzer and was almost two years in development.  It runs on your own server, rather than on your desktop, or as a plug-in to your email program.  You control the filtering rules, and it weeds out the trash emails before they get downloaded to your inbox.

Besides quarantining the junk mail on your server, so you never have to deal with it, SpamBlitzer has got the most powerful and flexible filtering rules of any tool I've ever seen.  Most people aren't even aware of the "fake HTML tags" that many spammers insert inside their emails; disguising the words that the typical filters trap.  SpamBlitzer is aware of this trick and strips the fake HTML tags so that it can still filter the junk.

Probably my favorite though, is the ability to automatically generate filters.  If a spam gets past your filters into your Inbox you let SpamBlitzer know and it zaps the email.  Not only that, it will suggest new filters based on the content of the spam, to stop similar emails from getting into your Inbox in the future!

Again, the ball is in our court.  This is an issue we're going to have to deal with for some time, and Neil Shearing's SpamBlitzer gets my vote for the time/effort saving tool of the year.