Robert Haskins

The battle with spam can easily be compared to an arms race. Spammers will learn about and start exploiting a certain method to send their garbage messages. E-mail administrators (with the help of open source developers and vendors) will respond with anti-spam tools battling the latest and "greatest" spammer methodologies. This seems to be an endless cycle, having yet to reach an end point. Some of the more common anti-spam methodologies in use today include (though this is certainly not an exhaustive list): Header/content checks (SpamAssassin) Bayesian analysis Sender authentication (Sender Policy Framework, Yahoo DomainKeys, etc.) Challenge/response (TMDA, Camram) Static whitelists/blacklists Blackhole listing (SORBS, Kelkea MAPS) Distributed checksums (DCC, Vipul's ... (more)

How To Choose an Anti-Spam Service Provider

There are many anti-spam solutions available to the e-mail administrator, resulting in a daunting task when attempting to pick an anti-spam solution. Some general classifications of anti-spam solutions include (examples in parentheses): > Open source (SpamAssassin) > Standalone commercial applications (Sophos PureMessage for Unix) > Closely integrated with an existing e-mail solution (McA... (more)