Understanding Spam Protection Offered By Your Hosting Provider

By Author: Amy Armitage
Total Articles: 4717
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We all know what spam is - unwanted e-mail content and attachments that clutter up our e-mail inboxes and waste disk space on our computers. We also know that we don't like it, for obvious reasons. Most of it is a minor pain to look through and delete, while some of it is actually detrimental to our computing lives. So what do we do about it? Well, there are a fair number of commercial spam protection applications available in stores or online for PC users everywhere. Some of these work better than others, of course, and some cost more than others. You can even use a few of these spam protection applications free of charge. But what about dealing with spam at its source - through your e-mail account and your hosting provider? Here, we'll shine a little light on just those questions with a few good answers.

Let's start with looking at how spammers find you in the first place. It all begins with your e-mail address. Spammers are able to dump countless numbers of spam e-mails on you because they found your e-mail address someplace. While those who have a regular home or work e-mail address will receive spam, it is even more ...
... likely if you have a website with an advertised e-mail address. There is a handy tool that spammers have, called a spam magnet, which is an application that scours the web for new e-mail addresses that may be displayed on contact pages or other site pages.

Help from your host

Website hosting providers typically offer their customers e-mail accounts with their domain. Some provide spam protection, as well as virus protection. However it may be worth doing the homework to determine just which ones do it better, so that it saves your mailbox from filling fast or your computer from becoming compromised.

A lot has been done since the advent of high-volume e-mail, over a dozen years ago, by hosting providers seeking to prevent the unnecessary floods of bothersome and/or dangerous spam. One of the very first things that providers do is enable a simple blacklist operation for PC users, which essentially helps identify and block certain e-mail addresses that regularly send unwanted mail. While this is helpful for the few sources that you can identify - such as a local car wash that got your e-mail from a prize raffle - it doesn't really block the thousands of other sources of spam from people and sources you don't know. Most of the time, spam that originates from one source is actually broadcast through many ports or computers with different e-mail addresses and "Subject" lines, making it tough to backtrack and block by blacklisting. Spam gurus have taken it to the next level in recent years and fighting back requires more advanced ways of retaliation and prevention.

Keywords and "regular expressions"

There are a great many types of spam prevention filters available through hosting providers today. One of those types of application filters is tasked with identifying keywords. The keyword filters look for a regularly occurring bunch of characters and simply block the message if that exact bunch or grouping is discovered. There is an issue with this type of method, however. These types of word filters can remove unwanted mail by designated keywords but then may block wanted e-mails that happen to contain some of those keywords. For example, if a user places the word "chicks" in their keyword filter, they may realize that important e-mail information about farm-raised baby pet chickens, or "chicks," necessary for their pet store business, never arrives. There are some other applications that attempt to fix this challenge by employing something called "regular expressions" to create a complex set of rules to prevent spam from ever hitting your e-mail inbox.

Regular expressions are rules of syntax that help show specific groups of letters, numbers or other characters. All of these rules can be arranged to show character patterns that are regularly employed in spam by spam creators. They can become quite complex, however, and like other filtering techniques they are not infallible. There are a few applications that filter by means of regular expressions that allow users to alter and expand them for better accuracy.

There is a still higher level of spam filtering that hosting providers use today, known as Bayesian filters. These applications take a huge group of data and calculate the likelihood that a message is spam based on the content's similarity to other spam messages circulating on the Internet and that have arrived in other e-mail boxes. The greater the number of e-mails that are processed and flagged are likely to make the filter application work better. Services that offer anti-spam applications for web hosts, like "Barracude" or "MailBoxCop," filter out millions of e-mails and give the best success and fewest mistakes blocking spam. These applications are rather smart about identifying spam and become better the more filtering they do. The browser-based web interface retains flagged "bad" messages in an area that enables users to look for any false positives. Then a user can set up a whitelist and blacklist to prevent later false alarms. a
About Author:
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They offer a wide-range of services from linux virtual private servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans. Visit online for more information.