For those of you not familiar with spam filtering and elimination tools, this is one that you will start hearing much more about as Cloudmark's Spamnet 2.x is gaining serious traction in the client side spam elimination tool space. What is so unique and compelling about Cloudmark's solution is its community based approach to spam elimination.

This Spamnet tool runs a plug-in to the current versions of Microsoft's Outlook e-mail application. Cloudmark has chosen to initially focus on supporting the newest versions of Outlook (2000, XP and 2003) and is also working on a version that is compatible with Microsoft's scaled down version of Outlook called Outlook Express. Let me reiterate, you must be a user of Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express to take advantage of this application. If you are a user of a web based e-mail system, such as Yahoo, AOL or HotMail and DO NOT download your e-mail into Outlook, than this program is not for you.

With over three quarters of a million users (also known as spam fighters), rating incoming messages, I have found Spamnet 2.0 to be THE most effective spam fighting tool that I have ever used, and I've tried many of them. Each of the tools on the market, available from vendors such as McAfee or Norton are very flexible in that they can connect directly to a users mail server and filter mail before it gets downloaded to the local inbox, however they use some of the more traditional and in my opinion, less effective approaches to eliminate spam.

The most basic approach employed by most tools is to search through lists of keywords, known domains used by spammers, known spam header spoofing techniques, and then match them against the different parts of the incoming message. While effective, spammers are constantly coming up with new ways to work around these programs, they change the domains that they use to send spam, and they can also change the techniques that they use for spoofing header information. This is a first generation approach that, while effective at eliminating a lot of spam, has a tendency to take the baby with the bath water as they say.

A slightly more advanced approach to spam filtering is to apply a scoring system to the previous approach, so that a message that meets only one of the criteria may not automatically get tagged, but if it racks up a high enough score…SPAM it iS! Essentially this is very similar to the first approach in that it relies on the developer to come up with the initial list of keywords and patterns and then the user must subsequently update them and teach the system how to respond as spammers get more sophisticated. That last statement was very important. As spammers get more sophisticated, a variety of techniques are employed to create more complex metadata, subject strings and body messages that can evade the basic spam filters. As a result, this approach loses a large percentage of its effectiveness.

I have found these approaches to be anywhere from 60% to 70% effective. More often then not I find myself wasting time by having to search through everything that was flagged to create new rules and white list addresses so that they don't get flagged in the future. Most of my time is spent teaching the system how to behave.

This is where Cloudmark differentiates itself from the others. While Spamnet does employ some client side filtering (based on white lists, etc…) as described above, based on traditional algorithms, the majority of spam detection and filtering is done by users like you and I who theoretically know what spam is when we SEE it. You are probably wondering how the heck that works. Well, Cloudmark has built the first, largest and fastest-growing Spam Fighting community in the world. This community connects people in real-time by allowing them to designate mail as spam in their e-mail program by clicking an add-in button on the Outlook toolbar.

Once a user flags a message as spam, as long as they are on the Internet and have connectivity to Cloudmark's servers, this information gets processed by a series of patented algorithms created by Cloudmark which are referred to as spamDNATM. Once enough users have flagged a message as spam, whenever that message shows up in a subscriber's mailbox, the message is flagged as spam and can be treated in a number of ways. It can be moved to a temporary spam folder (also know as quarantine), it can be moved to the trash and deleted, or it can be left in the inbox and categorized as spam. At this point it's always a good idea to check what was flagged as spam just to make sure that it hasn't errantly flagged something that you wanted.

According to my custom statistics provided by the Cloudmark, I have used Spamnet to process over 12,000 e-mail messages since I began using it about 6 months ago, over 4,300 of which were automatically flagged as spam and another 350 of which I manually designated as spam. According to Cloudmark this has saved me over 12 hours of my time. Now, while I'm not to sure how they reached this 12 hours figure, they have certainly saved me a lot of time and aggravation, which is worth way more then the measly $1.99 per month subscription fee that I pay.

Now, one thing you may be saying to yourself is…How can someone else know what I consider to be spam? This is a valid concern and is exactly why the size of the community and maintaining the integrity of those who participate in it are critical to its long-term success. In order to address this, Cloudmark has devised a rating system for its users. The more you participate (rate e-mails by clicking block or unblock on the Spamnet plug-in) in the system and are in agreement with the consensus rating of an e-mail, your integrity rating will improve and over time, will be weighted higher then users or users who are less frequently in agreement.

This is a classic example of the power and intelligence of the internet, and those who use it, being leveraged for the common good. If one person flags an e-mail message as not spam because they are trying to get this message out to the masses, their single vote will be diluted by those who consider the message spam. As a result, that message will show up as a spam and be automatically flagged by the subscribers of the system.

Keep in mind that as with any system that relies on the common good for its intelligence, it can be manipulated if enough people collude to subvert the system, but of all the applications that I have seen, Cloudmark Spamnet is by far the most effective and least expensive, bordering on 98% to 99% effective and 1.99USD a month, that I have ever had the pleasure to use.

I would encourage you to sign up for a 30-day free trial of this application and test it out right away. If you decide to just dive right in, please click here to subscribe to SpamNet. Also, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I'd be happy to answer them if I can.