Tech Talk: At Last, Effective Spam
Defense
by Paula Eisenberg
(July 15, 2002) Spam could kill email.
That would be a crying shame, since email is the "killer
app", or essential application, of the Internet.
Millions of people from all walks of life have embraced
email as the fastest, most convenient and best way to
communicate over time and distance, at virtually no
cost.
Trouble is, the spammers have figured this out too,
and they're flooding the world's electronic mailboxes
with come-ons for porn, Viagra (is there a link there,
somehow?), cheap home  loans,
online detective agencies ("Find out anything,
about anybody!"), eBay secrets and more. Much more.
I don't know about you, but dealing with spam has become
a big part of my workday, and I heartily resent it!
I may get more spam that most people because I own
and manage several websites, and therefore several of
my email addresses are displayed online, ready to be
scooped up by address-collecting robots. (Don't worry
about giving the Gazette your address for our newsletter
-- it won't be displayed online and we will never give
or sell it to anyone.) But almost everybody I know
is being drowned in spam, and they're all looking for
a solution.
You can set up your email program (Outlook, Outlook
Express, Netscape Communicator, Eudora) to filter out
unwanted email, and this used to take care of most of
the spam. But lately the spammers have found ways to
circumvent the filters, employing a myriad of sneaky
methods. I've been waking up to 60-80 new spam messages
every morning, with another 50 or so arriving during
the workday. Enough!
Just as I was ready to go back to tin cans and string,
I learned about ChoiceMail, a new anti-spam program
that actually works. I've been trying it out
for a couple of days now, and so far, so good. This
morning, instead of my usual bumper crop of 60-odd spam
messages, I had only one. Oh, happy day!
Here's how ChoiceMail works. The program sits on your
computer and acts as a first line of defense between
your email program and the outside world. You tell Choicemail
to gather all the email addresses in your addressbook,
so it will automatically approve and allow through any
email from those people. Everything else is blocked
from even arriving in your inbox, and the sender is
sent a message inviting him/her/it to go to a webpage
and fill out a form, requesting permission from you
to accept future emails from that entity. Very few spammers
will bother filling out the form, so you'll never receive
anything from them again. Legitimate people who really
need to get in touch with you probably will fill
out the form. You can also manually add senders to your
approved list, and you can manually add bad actors to
your rejected list. And anyone to whom you initially
send an email is automatically pre-approved.
Say your old boyfriend from high school gets your email
address from somewhere and tries to contact you. He'll
get a notice telling him to fill out the request form,
and you'll
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ChoiceMail's sender request screen
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get a notice allowing you to accept or reject him. Rejecting
him might feel great if he dumped you back in 10th grade!
You can look at a list of the senders who tried to
get through to you, and if you see one you do want,
you can just add that person to your approved list.
You don't have to then delete all the others, because
the program automatically deletes them after a preset
number of days.
ChoiceMail lets you download
a free version to try for 14 days. If you choose to
keep it, you pay $29.95. Unless I discover some terrible
glitch, I plan to ante up the 30 bucks. ChoiceMail is
that good.
System requirements:
- Windows NT, 2000, XP, 98, ME
- Supports standard POP email clients (Outlook, Outlook
Express, Eudora etc)
- Does NOT support MSN, AOL or web-based email systems
ChoiceMail's programmers are working on versions for
Mac, AOL and web-based email users. If you're behind
a firewall at work, the program will work if you can
access your POP and SMTP servers.
If you try ChoiceMail, I'd like to hear from you. Email
me and tell me what you think about the program,
or about any anti-spam program you've tried. I'll do
a follow-up report later on.
Update: July 17
So far, so good! I've been using ChoiceMail for two
full days now, and the program has blocked most of the
spam emails that would have littered my inbox without
its protection. It has let a few in, inexplicably; I've
emailed customer support to ask why. It has blocked
a few from people I do want to hear from, but I was
able to add them to my approved list, and they'll get
a notice asking them to fill out a form, asking for
my approval. I even emailed them separately to let them
know what's going on, in case they're skittish about
filling out the form.
There were only 15 blocked senders when I first looked
this morning, at 7:00 a.m. There were around 50 the
first morning I had ChoiceMail installed, so I assume
many of those 50 have given up already. Not bad!
Update: August 19
Wow. I am really impressed with ChoiceMail, after using
it for over a month. The only problem I see is that
it was a little hard to configure properly, and that
was in fact the reason some spam was getting through.
I hadn't set it up just right, and that was because
the directions weren't very clear. I'm a pretty experienced
software user, and if I was having trouble, I'll bet
many other people would too.
I'll tell you what I was doing wrong, so you can avoid
my mistake if you choose to try the program. In order
for ChoiceMail to work, it has to effectively become
the gateway between your email program and the world.
You have to instruct your email program (Outlook, Outlook
Express, Netscape Messenger, Eudora, etc.) to look for
email only through ChoiceMail. In other words, you set
up ChoiceMail to be the only mailserver you're using.
You tell ChoiceMail which email accounts to check for
new mail, so it's doing the receiving first, before
your old email program ever "sees" the new
mail. I hadn't fully understood that, so I had been
letting ChoiceMail filter only a few of my many email
addresses. So Outlook was still getting flooded with
many new spam emails a day.
I've fixed the problem by shutting down all my email
accounts in Outlook except the one
standing in for ChoiceMail, called "localhost."
Bingo! Just in the last three days, ChoiceMail has blocked
127 spam emails. It also blocked a couple of emails
from people I do want to hear from, but I just added
those people to my approved list with a right-click.
No problem. I have gotten zero spam in my Outlook inbox
since I figured out how to properly configure ChoiceMail.
Well worth the money.
If you're trying ChoiceMail or some other anti-spam
program, please let
me know how it's going. I'd also like to hear your
general computer/technology questions for future columns.
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