Spammers feel the heat

Last week saw the launch of a number of new initiatives to combat spam, indicating that the problem remains high on the list of companies' concerns.

Free online email provider MSN Hotmail last week added extra spam protection for its users as its long-discussed relationship with anti-spam tools vendor Brightmail finally bore fruit.

MSN said it was blocking 2.4 billion spam emails each day - which could make it more popular with employees using the service while out of the office.

Brightmail said Hotmail employs a network of 250 email accounts to identify the most common spam messages and so to block the most prolific senders.

Separately, hosting company TDM Group has increased its anti-spam activities by disconnecting any of its customers that it believes are sending unsolicited emails, regardless of whether or not they are using its infrastructure to send the spam.

Although its own terms and conditions already outlaw the sending of spam using its systems, last week TDM said it would terminate the contracts of any of its customers that were involved in spamming through any service.

The company said it hoped this stand would be followed by others. In a statement Tarek Meliti,TDM's technical director, said, "If other ISPs and hosting companies follow our lead, we can make it much harder for spammers to operate."

Internet filtering company SurfControl's anti-spam team has drawn up a checklist for companies wishing to classify and stop spam. Last week the company released the guide, which suggests five methods of filtering out spam. These include identifying known spam strains, a lexical analysis of words and phrases, and using artificial intelligence within company systems that can be trained to learn rules concerning typical spam messages.

Separately, legitimate marketers are trying to distance themselves from the spammers. Jez Jowett, head of the new media division at promotions company Electric Cake, said his firm had been sending out responsible marketing emails for a number of years. "From day one we made sure that we understood the emotional and legal processes that surround email marketing," he said.

Jowett added that his company had tried to find out the most acceptable way to email users - for example, identifying the file sizes that would not be rejected by the firewalls such as those on MSN's Hotmail inboxes.

Electric Cake relies on the quality of its emails and information to encourage its messages to spread and to attract interest from new subscribers, said Jowett.

Have your say: reply to IT Week