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Handling Spam
Spam works when senders of spam send out email by the billions. If only the very smallest fraction of people respond, spamming is worthwhile.
Established Spam Handlers
There are several systems that are designed to "recognise" spam. They establish common patterns of spam, such as the word "Viagra", and mark the emails as spam. The quality of the software that is available is little short genius. For Linux, the anti-spam software we have used are "SpamAssassin" and "QSF".
But there are two problems with the conventional systems. Firstly, spammers keep learning new ways to fool the spam software. Secondly, there is no disincentive to the spammer in sending spam.
"Spam a lot less!" from Software Design UK
There is an alternate system available, for which we have developed one of several, that works on a separate principle. We call our software "Spam a lot less!" or "sall" for short. Instead of trying to recognise spam software, our software keeps track of approved emailers in a database. The start point is users of the software uploading their email contact details to the system. The software allows all emails from these "whitelisted" emails. Users of the system can also identify emails they want blocked, by "blacklisting" them. The key part of the software is for the overwhelming numbers of spam email that have been neither whitelisted nor blacklisted. For these, our software sends them an email asking them to confirm that the email is genuine. Before confirmation, emails are kept in a queue, awaiting confirmation. As soon as the confirmation is received, the emails are released. After four weeks, all unconfirmed emails are deleted from the stack.
Just as with other software, this does not provide a water-tight solution to spam. But what is does do, for the first time, is to provide disincentive to spammers. If spammers have to confirm every one of the billions of emails they send out, they will be out of business. So either they can ignore the request for confirmation or reply. If they reply and enough people use this system, the spammers will quickly be out of business.
As an illustration to the effectiveness, our highest recipient of spam used to received over 300 spams per day. After use of the filter, considerably less than 2 spams per day are received on average.
Using SALL
For those who want to use the new system without developing it themselves, we are close to completion of a commercial system that make "Spam a lot less!" available to the general public.
The system is available for £1 per month per email address, by clicking on the link below:
http://www.spamalotless.co.uk
Open Source downloads
For those who want to use the software for their own use or to develop it in an open source environment, we have provided a release of the "Spam a lot less!" code, with full explanation of how the software works.
To access the code, click the link below:
http://www.spamalotless.co.uk/open.source.html
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