There is one way to block all spam: Turn off your mail server.

Seriously, though, there is no way to identify 100% of all spam. And, the more you block, the more legitimate E-mail gets blocked as well. You can catch a good chunk of spam pretty easily, but it gets very hard after that. We've come up with a couple different methods that would catch around 80% to 90% of spam, but at that point, it gets very difficult finding ways of catching more spam without catching legitimate E-mail.

Another issue that makes the problem worse is that humans can't even identify 100% of spam! It's easy to say that the "Get r*ch quick" E-mail is a spam. But what about the one that eBay sends because they lost people's E-mail preferences, and decided to assume everyone wants their E-mail?

Then, what about legitimate UCE (unsolicted commercial E-mail)? What about a company that uses UCE to market legal and acceptable products or services? What if they target specific people, who might be interested in their product?

One of the things we would like to see is a way for companies to be able to send out UCE. One of the biggest problems with spam is that there is so much UCE that is garbage (about 95%+ is get rich quick schemes, illegal porn scams, etc.) that legitimate companies stay away from UCE. UCE though, like junk "snail mail", can be useful. If there was a standard that would let legitimate companies send out UCE, but clearly marking it as such (so the end user could easily filter to another mailbox or delete it), it could be a great marketing tool.

-- -Scott

Declude: Anti-virus and Anti-spam solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com --