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Technical Solutions to the Spam Problem

If you are visiting this page, it's probably because you read my article that appeared in the April 2003 issue of the Weston Gazette.

Things to Keep in Mind Before Deciding on a Solution

There are many technical ways of decreasing the amount of spam in your inbox. The solution you chose will depend on many factors such as:

Do you have your own email server or do you use the servers of your ISP (Internet Service Provider)?.
What operating system does the server run? Windows? UNIX/Linux? Mac?
What operating system does your personal computer run? Windows? Linux? Mac?
How much tolerance do you have for "false-positives"? False-Positive are messages that have been incorrectly tagged as spam but are in fact legitimate messages.
Are you willing to subject senders to an authentication procedure?

Solutions I Personally Use and Recommend

Over the years, I have used many different ways of reducing the amount of spam I received. I have come to the conclusion that the best defense is to install a filtering program at the server layer. It's just not practical to try and syncronize the solution across all personal computers (at the corporate level I have to manage over a hundred computers, and personally I have a laptop and a desktop and I regularly use others' computers to retreive my mail via a web browser when I'm travelling).

Because I have my own server running the Debian distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system, I have chosen the following open-source programs.

SpamAssassin - http://www.spamassassin.org/ - This is a rules based system that assigns point to incoming messages. If the points for a message surpass a set limit, the message is tagged as spam. Messages that are tagged as spam can then be sorted into a separte folder in your mail client or the messages can be deleted automatically.

TMDA (Tagged Message Delivery Agent) - http://www.tmda.net/ - This system does not deliver any messages to you unless the sender is in your approved list. If the sender is not in your approved list, the system automatically emails the sender and asks that they reply to the automated message in order to prove the message did not come from an automated spam program (and that the senders address hasn't been faked). Once the sender responds, the original message is delived to you. You can also manually add senders to your approved list or denied list.

Open-Source programs let you see and change the code. Many open-source programs are licensed under the GPL (General Public License), which permit anyone to FREELY to install, modify, and redistribute the program. These programs are developed by volunteers all over the world. In fact, many Open-Source solutions are technically better/more advanced than proprietary solutions developed by companies like Microsoft or McAfee.

If you don't run a UNIX/Linux server or would like to know about other available solutions, here's a list of other alternatives.

If you don't control your email server or would prefer to use a filter at the personal computer level, here's a list of client layer solutions.