Thursday 24 July, 2003 at 6:22PM (Nereus)  ::  permalink  ::  comments (5)

Yup we all hate it - junk mail, also referred to as 'spam'. There's a few points worth noting before you go loose with your email spam filters though, the main thing is this: many spam filters don't work (at least not 100% as they should).

I've used and/or tested hotmail, lycos.com, mail.com (which I think lycos.com uses anyway) and a few others fairly extensively. Particularly with lycos and hotmail, I found in both cases their spam filters don't live up to what they claim, not by a long shot.

I discovered a disturbing problem with lycos back in April after having used their service for about a year. In my case, even though the spam filter was set to 'low' (there was no 'off' option, believe it or not, just low, medium or high filtering), I found that their spam filter was diverting some of my incoming emails into the 'junk mail' folder that were definitely not junk mail. To add insult to injury, on the highest filtering setting, a significant percentage of spam was still getting through to my inbox anyway. What was even more frustrating was that their server automatically deleted mail in the junk mail folder after 5 days, so who knows how many emails from friends and from job applications had been diverted in there and subsequently deleted without me ever being aware of them?

Lycos also had an option so I could specify email addresses not to be filtered. I tried it. It didn't work, the emails sometimes went to the junk mail folder, sometimes not, filtering seemed pretty much arbitrary. With hotmail the same thing happened - emails from the same sender were not consistently filtered - some went to the junk mail folder, some to the inbox, and there appeared to be no logical reason as to why.

Here's some interesting info I found more recently though: it appears that some particular styles of writing and vocabulary are so similar to spam messages (according to the filter) that even a smart filtering program can't tell the difference. Some programs will look for keywords and filter based purely on that. Others work off an international database of known email spam addresses and filter on that. That database option in theory is a good idea, but there's a problem - the spam email addresses are suggested by users of the system. This means there may be a company who has been classed as spam, but you are applying for a job with them, or they are emailing you to let you know of an overdue account etc.. so what happens? The filter spits it into the junk mail folder and you never see it. The result is you don't get the job you applied for, or don't get the overdue account advice and end up paying additional fees etc.

Of course this can get much more personal. What about a friend or family member trying to contact you urgently while you're travelling or not reachable by phone? This could (and no doubt has) resulted in some very bad or embarrassing situations.

There's a number of people I've emailed (or replied to their emails) over the past months who have never replied. I can't help wondering - did my email get filtered to their junk mail folder, or are they just not interested in talking to me? Have I offended them in some way? Maybe they did reply, but the reply got junked as spam at my end. This just SUCKS.

There is only one apparent solution if you're using one of these free mail services, and I strongly suggest you take my advice on this - have a scan through your junk mail folder every couple of days. Look at the senders email address and the email subject (although spammers are getting more and more creative with their email subject headers now, so that may not be the best way to scan). You'll be surprised what ends up in that folder.

Also use an email name that friends or associates will recognise, this will make it less likely that they'll shoot your email to the trash folder thinking it's just more spam.

Last but not least, think twice of who you use for your email provider. Users of popular providers such as hotmail are well known to field at least 100 junk emails or more a day (in fact, one person I read about when researching this on the internet claimed to be receiving up to 1400 junk mails a day on hotmail!).

This entry was 'inspired' after reading another blogger's venting at their email woes, which reminded me of the problems I also experienced. I hope it is of some use to you. For further info and solutions, refer to the internet security section on this site.