Hamblenet - Spam Problems
Spam is unsolicited advertising received by email. This can range from offers to reduce your mortgage to rather less savoury offerings with pictures of a pornographic nature. All advertising emails sent by UK companies must, by law, also include instructions about how to prevent further submissions. Companies in other countries don't have to comply with this and frequently spam originates from developing countries in Latin America or the far East.
The Hamblenet email system scans and removes the more obvious Spam emails but will let through some of the more believable messages. It's all a compromise, some users might like to receive offers to reduce their mortgage while others would find them an irritating nuisance. What we try to do is to prevent the more obvious and offensive messages getting through.
There are many applications available to help
with Spam filtering and removal, some of them use simple
rules and some just a blacklist of spammers email addresses.
The one that we have found to be very effective is Ella.
This uses an heuristic engine to filter Spam before it
gets to your mailbox.
Ella has the ability to learn what you consider to be
Spam and what you consider to be a valid and wanted message.
It starts off by asking you to show it 10 valid emails
and then 10 spam emails. From this it can develop a good
set of rules to filter your emails. It uses these rules
helped by a web based blacklist kept up
to date by the developer. On Outlook Express you get
some additional buttons and a couple of extra folders
and you can use these to flag further spam and train
the program to be more accurate as time passes. We think
it's probably 95% effective.
A trial version of Ella can be downloaded from
the web and if you are happy with its performance you
can purchase a full licence, which gives you a years
updates. If you would like us to get you a copy and install
it contact Westfield
Computer Services and we'll be pleased
to help.
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