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Handling Spam
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There are three ways people generally handle spam.
Accept spam
Some people simply accept spam and delete spam messages as and when they come through.
Spam recognition software
There are many sophisticated programs that try to recognise spam from its contents (eg. Spam Assassin). Some of these programs are exceptionally clever. EMails identified as spam are put into a separate folder allowing a visual scan.
The key problem with the anti-spam software is that valid emails can easily be identified as spam, and sent to the spam folder. As spam emails become more sophisticated, increasing numbers of valid emails are identified as spam. Where there are large numbers of spam emails received, it becomes increasingly time consuming to process the spam emails, and increasingly likely that valid emails will not be recognised.
A lesser problem is that well constructed spam emails "pass" the recognition test and are included within the "spam-free" email folders.
At present, we estimate that between 2-10% of spam or valid emails are incorrectly identified.
Spam validation software
The latest generation of anti-spam software, of which Spam A Lot Less is a good example, does not try to recognise software. Instead, it tries to recognise the sender. It does so by comparing the sender's email address with the recipient's address book. Where the address is recognised, the email is passed through.
Where the email is not recognised, the sender is sent an email asking for a reply. If the sender is a real person sending an email for valid reasons, they provide the confirmation and their address is added to the address book (the "Whitelist"). If the sender is a spammer sending out millions of spam emails each day, it is not cost effective for them to reply to every confirmation email request.
At present, our experiences is that less than 0.1% of spammers reply to requests. So far, we are not aware of a single valid email that has failed to reach its destination.
One additional benefit of Spam validation software is that it becomes trivial to put a stop to unsolicited emails by adding their email address to a list of emails that are rejected (the "Blacklist").
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