Hi David,
<<Normally I would not trust anything that won't tell you how much -- as far
as I can tell you have to give your name, email, number of machines, etc to
find out how much it would cost..>>
http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/subscribe/
You need to look at the products page. The cost is $3.99 per month. A bit
pricey, I agree.
<<If you have to pay how much and what do you get.>>
You get a program that works with Outlook (and possibly Outlook Express, tho
I am not positive). What it does is scan every e-mail against its database
for spam. If other users have identified this email as spam, then it is
placed in your spam folder. If it has not been identified as spam, then it
stays in your inbox. This examination takes about 1-2 seconds. This
happens as you are connected to the Internet.
Users are rated as to their level of trustworthiness. If a user constantly
rates letters as spam when they are not, they are not trustworthy. For
example, let's say subscribe to Wall Street Journal and receive many of
their daily updates. Rather than going to WSJ and turning off your daily
updates, you decide instead to call the updates spam. Clearly, I and many
others would be upset and would unspam the message. Consequently, your
trustworthiness would go down. Next time you identified spam, Spamnet might
require others to confirm your selection.
Conversely, if a user only identifies true spam (you know the type, organ
enhancers and such), you are deemed very trustworthy. Then your "vote" has
more weight.
As of last night, there were 689,419 "spamfighters" engaged in identifying
spam. Currently, they add about 2-3000 spamfighters per day. With so many
people reviewing spam, very few actually reaches my inbox. In about 18
months, I have only identified 36 spam messages. (I am rated "most
trustworthy). The software comes complete with a toolbar for Outlook that
provides you with various statistics.
The above description is quick though not thorough description. It might
not be entirely accurate, though it ought to provide you with a flavor.
I am really happy with Cloudmark. My ISP doesn't filter spam. And I am
happy with Cloudmark doing the job for me. But if I received a lot of spam,
then I definitely agree with you that an ISP is your first line of defense.
My undestanding is that some ISPs merely identify spam with special headers.
I would be unhappy if my ISP were to delete some of my mail because ~it~
thinks I don't want to receive it, as I do subscribe to various letters and
such. Some of those emails might be incorrectly deemed spam.
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Kevin
David McRitchie said:
Hi Kevin,
When I look at a site the first thing I look for is -- is it free or do you
have to pay. If you have to pay how much and what do you get.
I can see that SpamNet (CloudMark) is not free because it says "Free Trial",
but I can't find out how much. Normally I would not trust anything
that won't tell you how much -- as far as I can tell you have to give
your name, email, number of machines, etc to find out how much it
would cost.. That said -- I do think I've seen it rated highly.
When you have spam coming in at more than 3 per ten minutes, you
really don't want to be filtering this stuff yourself. So your ISPs filters
would be your first line of defense -- and you may not have control
over them -- they are the ones where you have to watch out for losing
blind copy email among friends and small cubs. For some reason
MSN will not delete such entires when they fill up mail allocations and they count
in my total -- it is either 7 days retention or instant deletion. My allocation
would be filled up in 3 hours and then I would get absolutely not email
so I must delete instantly and there is no chance to review.
The Wall Street Journal article form Oct 11 is available to the public.
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm
Kevin Stecyk said:
