The anti-spam battlefield is in a complete chaos. The public has become more and more aware of the negative effects of junk mails and the voice against spam has become ever increasing, however, the amount of junk mails that found their way to your inbox keeps increase at the same or even quicker pace.

Unfortunately, unlike the war against viruses, which is pretty much straightforward, the war against spam is much more complicated and require multi-solutions. It requires multi-solutions because there is no single definition of spam. Mail that are legitimate to you might be spam to me. Some mail are vague in nature, they can be classified either as legitimate or junk mails.

So to fight spam successfully, you need to find the product that could not only stop most of spam while not blocking your legitimate mails, but also be able to conform to your personal habits and preferences.

Why spam keeps flooding my inbox even after spam filter is used?

To date, the most commonly used anti-spam technique for client-side products is blacklist. The logic behind this technique is to "mark" certain email addresses and domains as "blacklist"; and block mails that are originated from these addresses. The problem with this approach is that users need to maintain and constantly update their blacklist database in order to have the latest version but the filtering results are not at all satisfactory. It can hardly block spam as it is too easy for spammers to change their addresses every time after they send a bunch of spam and thus deem the whole blacklist useless. Some spam blockers adopt content-based filtering technique. The practice is to classify certain keywords as "dangerous" and block mails that contain such words altogether. The dark side of this approach is that it can produce a high rate of false positive (legitimate mails marked as spam) and at the same time, it's very easy for spammers to abandon certain keywords and use other words to express the same meaning.

Some other products offer the function of bouncing unwanted e-mails back to senders in order to fool them into believing that the email address is invalid, in hope to be removed from the spammers' list. Again, this method hardly stops spam as spammers won't check return emails or it even confirms that certain email addresses do exist.

Spam is never a problem for me as I never receive any junk mails???

It is quite possible that you don't receive any junk mails if your ISPs or organizations have already used server side spam filters. However, mind that some filters set very strict rules in order to block spam 100%, at the cost of causing a high rate of legitimate mails being blocked as spam, in some cases even without notice. It might not be a big deal for some individual users, but it causes inconvenience or even financial losses to others, especially organizations. For example, once I had two mail accounts, one is always full of spam while the other never. While I was very pleased with this mail account, only to find later that it kills quite some innocent mails which present certain spam characteristics.

Another filtering method I'd like to mention here is challenge response. For this approach, every new sender will need to fill a permission form before his/her mail is permitted into recipient's mail box. By this way, it can really block 100% of spam outside of your mail box. But it causes trouble and inconvenience for legitimate new senders and may result in delay or losses of important mails if a new sender is unable to send a confirmation notice on time or just don't bother to do it.

A whole new page in anti-spam battle -- Bayesian filtering

Bayesian statistics is first raised by English scientist T. Bayes. Its main characteristic is to use past experience for future prediction.

Two groups of research, one by Pantel and Lin and another by Microsoft Research introduced the use of naive Bayesian statistical technology in spam filtering. But it's Paul Graham's approach which has made Bayesian filtering become popular. Paul Graham believes that content-based filter is the way to block spam as what spammers really want to get across is their message. They can circumvent any other barrier you set up, and they have successfully achieved that so far. But if there is a software that can read their messages, spammers have no way to get around it.

But Bayesian filtering doesn't mark an email as spam simply because one or more bad words appear in it. Instead, it uses prior knowledge of email contents to assess the statistical probability that a mail is spam. Repeated experiment and practical use have proven that Naive Bayesian is not really naive, and its filtering accuracy actually far surpasses that of any other spam filtering techniques exist so far. After training for certain period, Bayesian filters block over 99.5% spam, with 0.03% false positives (A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham).

In the anti-spam battle, people also start to realize that it is not enough to block only existing spam as spam change fast. A good product should work effectively not only in current situation, but also in the future. That requires a spam filter to have the ability of continuous learning as spamming technique evolves. Bayesian filtering is just the technique that possesses this precious ability most other filtering techniques lack. To Bayesian filters, the filtering itself is a learning process and it can automatically adjust itself for latest challenges.

Why SpamWeed is right for you

Intelligent
SpamWeed uses statistic filtering technology combined with refined algorithm and other advanced technologies to achieve ideal filtering results with virtually no false positive (legitimate mails falsely classified as spam). Its innovative system whitelist technique frees users from building their email contacts one-by-one in order to safeguard their friends' mails. System whitelist automatically tracks incoming legitimate mails and manages your friends' database. SpamWeed also has enhanced features such as automatic mailing list identification.

Safe email management
Many users have the false perception that once a legitimate mail is classified as spam, they can't retrieve them back. This is not true. For SpamWeed, in case of false positive, users can easily take it back to their inbox.

Easy-to-use
Some anti-spam products require users to be an expert in order to use them. For SpamWeed, most of our clients just install them and start using it without any problem. If you are not sure with a few functions, refer to SpamWeed help file and it usually answers most problems you might have. Above all, once SpamWeed is running, almost no maintenance is required.

Integrate with most popular email clients
Unlike many other spam filters which works with specific email clients, the current version of SpamWeed works with all POP3 email clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Pegasus Mail, Eudora, Incredimail, The Bat, Becky!, Pocomail and many more.

The ultimate goal is to save your time
The annoyance of spam is that it takes you a lot of time to read through and to delete them. Spam filters should be designed not only to remove spam from your inbox, but should also do it in a most efficient way so that users need not spend a lot of time to handle a spam filter in order to achieve satisfactory filtering results. SpamWeed technical team has taken and will continue to take every possible step to make the product easy-to-use and time-saving.