Just about everyone have heard of Spam by now, and just about everyone has given up on the idea that there may be a way to stop Spam 100% of the time. Could this be true? The current email implementation makes it hard to identify who sent the mail because the Spammers can falsify the "from" information in the email headers. To truly track down who sent what and when would require network-layer counter measures, and the only people that can do that are the network providers. Unless they are working with the government on some project like the Government Super-Snoop Plan, where anything and everything that goes through the network can be analyzed, I do not see them doing this as it boost the network traffics… Too good for the network carriers! This is what I call the "shoot the ants with a nuclear bomb" approach. Another strategy is the "clean up the litter as they trash the place" approaches that is use by much of the email readers programs these days. They filter through all your incoming emails for stuff like "V.I.A.G.R.A" or "Ban*Ned C*D" in the contents and discard ones that are suspect. ISPs also use this filtering approach to get rid of the Spam before you download it to your email reader. We all know that none of these approaches works 100% of the time, else I think you would be less interested in reading this article.

So how do the spammers get our email addresses anyway? They do it many ways, but one popular method is randomly creating email addresses to known domain names. I administer my own email server and see bogus recipients all the time. They narrow down the list by using the "opt-out" link at the bottom of the email. If you ever hit on that, then they record your email address as "live". My sympathy, your email address has permanently been stored into the spammers’ database! This happened to me once, I hit an opt-out link thinking the email was from a genuine business, and the following week, my junk email tripled. Spammers seem to have a quota of real emails addresses to conduct business because it seems they do lots of "fishing", to find real email addresses. As people change their email, over time, the junk emails seems to increase, which leads me to believe spammers are targeting live emails more than just blasting junk everywhere. Therefore, while fishing for new email addresses, spammers are operating blindly, only having an email to work with. That is enough to find most of our inboxes.

So what is the problem? The problem is that spammers can put junk into your inbox too easily, either from a list obtained from other spammers or randomly generated. The real problem, however, is that you do not have the power to remove yourself from the list once they have identified that your email address is valid. Once they have your address, the only option you have is to get a new email address. Then the cycle starts over again, almost instantly in some cases.

We have been trying to create technology to get rid of spam, when we really should have focused on how to "not deal with spam". In reality, we don’t care if the spam is on the disk drives as long as it is temporary and we don’t have to look at it. Would you believe me if I told you the tools to combat spam 100% already exist and you could start using it with your friends and family today? You don’t have to change your email address, or your email reader, or buy anything new… It’s even free! You must think I’m crazy just about now, but I’m not.

(cont) How it works...