Antispam. We're not all! Don't you hate him?

You have enough to do without having to examine a lot of unwanted emails, or even worse, offensive in your inbox.

So what can be done about it? What antispam software and procedures really work?

The Spam filtering software is the first stop in your Antispam campaign, but it is somehow the easiest to subvert.

What this anti-spam tool does is tell your email system to look for designated keywords (sex, nudity, pornography, for example) and to delete the messages that contain these keywords. Of course, there are easy ways to avoid these anti-spam tactics. Have you ever seen a message that comes with the word spelled sex S * e * x? Well, that Asterisk method has eluded your junk mail filter or spam filter from your email provider and the Internet.

The other problem with this filter is that you can lose legitimate messages. A friend, for example, who could send you an email saying that he was "sick of the appearance of pornography sites" could have deleted his message because it contained the word pornography.

Two improved versions of these anti-spam filtering products are Bayesian and heuristic filters, which attempt to identify offensive messages by recognizing phrases as objectionable. Apache SpamAssassin is probably the best known example of heuristic filtering. What these filters are doing that the most basic are not is to look at the message itself instead of the subject heading. Both Bayesian and heuristic filters have a Achilles heel in the sense that they depend on their filtering on the frequency. If a spammer sent a short message, it would happen.

To further complicate things by punishing the "good guys", the main Internet service providers began to simply consider sending batch emails as possible spam. What this did, however, was to disrupt opt-in products, such as e-journals and newsletters. So that didn't work out well. The spammers themselves found a way to avoid it anyway. When they sent their messages in batches, they inserted a program that produced a variant in each header. Maybe a word that didn't even make sense, but still individualized each message enough so that batch processing doesn't appear as batch processing.

Some non-profit Internet surveillance agencies began to keep lists of the IP addresses of spammers. When these addresses arose in the mail they were blocked. The way to avoid this to spammers was simple: they changed IP addresses. The result was even worse, as these addresses were delivered to completely innocent people who now had trouble sending emails. Then the spammers got really aggressive and began to create and distribute viruses allowing them to hijack IP addresses that were not in the "spam " lists.

Where the answer seems to be in many companies and on their sites is to omit the standard email communication and resort to online comment forms for electronic communication. Which, of course, does not solve the problem of antispam for private people who do not have their own website.