Introduction to SpamProbe

EW3D.com and Anti-Spam
Over the last year we have seen the implementation of anti-spam devices on almost every mailserver. Sounds good, right? Well, as many of our clients can attest, in the business world this has proven everything but good. EW3D.com has carefully considered many possibilities with very few acceptable meeting our criteria for an anti-spam device.

The Trouble with Anti-Spam
Almost all anti-spam systems work from a rule set central to the mail server. In other words, someone else decides what mail you should get. But this is actually much worse. Someone sets up a system and expects it to learn without any more input. Many administrators simply install an anti-spam system, first due to client pressure, but also since it reduces the load on their mailserver. Then many people are never told this has been done, nor how to get to the mail scored and stored as spam, if in fact the supposed spam even gets stored (many simply bounce it).

Bouncing spam? Well, that doesn't work either. Spammers don't receive mail, they only send it. If they had their servers set to receive bounces, they'd never get any mail out due to the pounding of the incoming mail.

There are so many reasons to be sure you are not on a system with anti-spam installed, but the bottom line is if you are, you can be sure that at least some of your client's email is not getting through and therefore you can feel pretty secure in the fact that you are missing sales.

"Is your inn friendly to gay couples?" (a recent email bounced to our system by our hosted client's poor anti-spam system)

We Deliver the Mail
EW3D.com does have a few blocks placed on a few known spammer's IPs and domain names. This does very little to help in the battle and actually can be a detriment as those IPs are dropped by the spammers and later assigned to an unsuspecting user. We also run attachment filtering to prevent the delivery of Windows executable files, which have become the de facto standard for the delivery of viruses. Otherwise, we deliver your email, spam and all.

Our Solution
After much research, we have decided on a bayesian filtering technique. This simple mathematical system has proven time and again as the very best method for spam scoring. A database is built containing words, word pairs and everything included in the headers and body of every email a user receives. Each is given a score rating the entry as good or spam. Each email is tested against this database and given an overall score which determines whether it is delivered to your inbox or your spam box. All mail is sent to either your POP Inbox or to an IMAP 'your_spam' box which are both accessible via your email client. We have three other 'training' mail boxes, 'is_spam', 'non_spam' and 'not_scored', to which you simply drag and drop messages in order to train your personal SpamProbe database. SpamProbe then rereads these emails, rescores them per your instructions to the database and then deletes them. So, if you get a spam in your 'Inbox', instead of deleting it, you drag it and drop it into the 'is_spam' box. If you get a good message in the 'your_spam' box, you simply drag it and drop it into the 'non_spam' box. It's that easy. The more you do it, the smarter SpamProbe becomes. Our test base of users have all reported that after initially training SpamProbe, it got so good that they simply quite looking at their spam. I personally went for 6 months of around 1000 emails a day without a single false positive (a good email scored as spam) that I ever found. I find the success rate to be far greater than I could do myself, as I used to go to sleep at the delete key, accidentally deleting good messages myself.

Interested?
If you are interested in trying SpamProbe, please visit both the Installation and Use pages for SpamProbe and read them thoroughly. Still interested? Yes, it's worth it, let us know by emailing John Hinton and requesting that SpamProbe be added to your account. Please understand you will need to be using a POP account on the EW3D.com server, and give me the username for that account.

Cost
This system uses a lot of disk space and processing time, therefore we need to charge a $60 per year fee per account.