Currently, seen from the perspective of a professional networker, what annoys me most are the spam e-mails that clutter my inbox every day (hundreds! - despite a filter!). What are your experiences with spam? What are your solutions? Filters? Changing your e-mail addresses every now and then? Changing your domain name when addresses associated to your domain are being widely abused by spammers? We have laws against spam that are quite drastic, on paper, but they appear to be largely unenforced. Which technical solutions are available to systematically trace industrial spammers and ensure that they cease and desist? Who should fulfill this role of public policing of the net?

I recently came across a spam tool www.mailinblack.com that is used by lawyers and other professionals. The system works with a one-off authentication by the sender and a pre-authorisation by the user. According to references, it works well, in particular avoiding false positive filtering. It is also worthwhile to look at http://spam-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/ where different anti-spam tools are compared.

There was a time when more than the 30% of mail emails was junk mail. Although, I use filters I still receive many emails with promises of becoming rich working at home, advertising, chain letters, etc. I believe is frustrating. I have read about this initiative/product and though it was interesting to share. Hopefully something like this will become widely adopted and letting us to come back to our productive rates at work and enjoying our free time to share and communicate with our friends. Have you heard about this? Abaca is a company founded by the multi millionaire Steve Kirsch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Kirsch ) who invented and owns the patent of the optical mouse. He also founded Infoseek Corporation, (acquired by Disney in1999) and Frame Technology (acquired by Adobe) In his personal web page (http://www.skirsch.com/) he says “ I spent 2 years and $5M developing the spam filter algorithm that is more than 10 times more accurate than anything else on the market. Customers of Abaca have seen accuracy rates as high as 99.99% and we have a 100% customer renewal rate” Abaca says to be the only company that has created a solution with a 99% spam blocking guarantee. Its product is called the Abaca Email Protection Gateway™ (EPG). They back up their statement with a money-back guarantee policy in which “if you don't get 99% filtering accuracy, Abaca will give you money back.” http://www.abaca.com/about_mgmnt.html

Just a note that SPAM laws in the US are somewhat less strict than those in the EU. This site contains the SPAM laws of both regions. The link here is specifically for the US federal SPAM laws, but you can link to information about other regions from here as well: http://www.spamlaws.com/federal/108s877nov22.shtml. I wonder if we receive more junk mail in the US than in the EU? Perhaps the legislation in the EU is so strong that no one pays attention to it (sort of like prohibition)? Although I certainly get my fair share of junk mail in the US as well, I do send e-mails to people marketing programs I offer and have read and follow the legislation. If I followed EU legislation, it would actually be difficult to do the targeted marketing I do in the US within the confines of the law. Just a thought.