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$250K oops: Check behind those spam filters

By | June 8, 2006, 6:08am PDT

Summary: A Georgia school district learned the hard way that the cure for spam may sometimes be worse than the disease. A Cobb County School District spam filter may have cost the district $250K when it blocked email about lower telephone services bid from a contractor.

Thought you could escape spam with smart email filters? Think again. A Georgia school district has learned the hard way that it doesn’t pay to rely on those filters completely.  A Cobb County School District spam filter may have cost the district $250K when it blocked email about lower telephone services bid from a contractor.

District officials say they have no way to retrieve the message. Spam filters that work at the gateway level often discard the messages out of hand, and thus must be carefully tuned to not report any good non-spam email ("ham") as being spam.

Some filters, such as the one built into Microsoft Outlook or Google’s GMail, redirect likely spam to a folder and hold it for a few days. This gives you the chance to review what the filter did, and help train it on what is and isn’t spam. However you would need to check your Junk E-mail/Spam folder regularly (at least once a week) to check for mistakes, and most people don’t bother.

A number of good open source spam filters are available such as SpamAssassin and SpamBayes. Identifying and filtering spam is something of an arms race - as the filters get smarter the spammers get more devious. Understanding how your filters work, their limitations, and what is expected of you can help keep your innocent email from becoming a casualty of war.

Source: eSchool News

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Ed Burnette is a software industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience as a programmer, author, and speaker. He has written numerous technical articles and books, most recently "Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform" from the Pragmatic Programmers.

Disclosure

Ed Burnette

Ed Burnette is a Manager of Mobile Development at SAS. However the postings on this site are his own and do not represent the positions, strategies, or opinions of his employer.

Biography

Ed Burnette

Ed Burnette has been hooked on computers ever since he laid eyes on a TRS-80 in the local Radio Shack. Since graduating from NC State University he has programmed everything from serial device drivers and debuggers to web servers. After a delightful break working on commercial video games, Ed reluctantly returned to business software. He currently develops enterprise software for Android phones and tablets.

In his copious spare time, Ed writes and speaks about all kinds of technology and software. His most recent books include the Eclipse IDE Pocket Guide from O'Reilly and Hello, Android: Introducing Google's Mobile Development Platform from the Pragmatic Programmers.

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Re: Download link
js_zorean 27th Jun 2006
Ed,

You can find the download page here:

http://www.emailxt.com/download/index.html

It is a "pre-pre-alpha" 0.1 version of InfinityXT, the official EmailXT client. It is made available for test purposes only. Expect bugs and non-working features. EmailXT is also a work in progress right now. The official launch will occur in just a few days.

Jorge Santos
0 Votes
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Instead of having such strong filters...
Nathank@... 9th Jun 2006
They could simply send/receive encrypted files so they know exactly who they are from and who they are intended to go to. One theory these days is to turn up spam filters so strong that an email from my sister, whose email address i've had for 10 years, gets put into spam.

Instead of turning it up so high why don't we learn how to send them with encryption software so you can easily pick out the good from the bad. Would you rather spend a small amount of money a year to make sure that your emails are safe or put yourself at risk of losing large amounts by spamming the message. Its almost a no brainer...

http://www.essentialsecurity.com/yourbusiness.htm

Nathank
0 Votes
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So let me get this straight... you would purchase a service from a vendor who, on a contract so big they can *save* $250K, but they send a bid via email and don't even follow up by email. Give me a break. They deserve to not get the bid, and their inability to follow even basic business practices me wonder if they could even deliver any service at all.

J.Ja
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EmailXT might be the answer
js_zorean 26th Jun 2006
A new proposal for email evolution called EmailXT has just been unveiled and although details are scarce, it does look promising.
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Contributr
Download link
Ed Burnette 26th Jun 2006
I couldn't find the download for that, is it available yet?
0 Votes
+ -
Re: Download link
js_zorean 27th Jun 2006
Ed,

You can find the download page here:

http://www.emailxt.com/download/index.html

It is a "pre-pre-alpha" 0.1 version of InfinityXT, the official EmailXT client. It is made available for test purposes only. Expect bugs and non-working features. EmailXT is also a work in progress right now. The official launch will occur in just a few days.

Jorge Santos

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