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AUGUST 23, 2002 FLASH PRODUCT REVIEW By Stephen H. Wildstrom Blocking Spam on the Home Front New antidotes to unwanted e-mail on personal accounts are hardly perfect. Still, they may be worth trying, especially if you're desperate
The last thing most e-mail users want to do is change their address. True, it would put an instant stop to all spam, but it's only a temporary fix and creates horrible problems in maintaining legitimate business communications. That's why you probably wouldn't want to route your regular e-mail through SpamSlicer. The system requires you to have mail sent to a spamslicer.com address. This redirection serves two purposes. First, it gives you a spare address to use on registration forms or inquiries that you suspect, probably correctly, are generating a lot of your junk mail. Second, it lets you track down the source of that spam and, if you want, block it (see BW Online, 8/20/02, "Strategies for Winning the War on Spam"). TELLTALE TAGGING. The way it works is you choose a user name that becomes your SpamSlicer address, say, johndoe@spamslicer.com. You can use this like any other e-mail address and read your messages in any standard mail program, such as Microsoft Outlook Express or Netscape Messenger. The interesting part comes when you register a product at LousySoftware.com. You create a new e-mail address by adding something after the "@" symbol. For example, johndoe@lousy.spamslicer.com. Any mail LousySoftware sends you will be tagged with that address. It will show up in your SpamSlicer inbox but will be readily identifiable. And if LousySoftware sells or gives your address to a third party, that mail too will show up addressed to johndoe@lousy.spamslicer.com. You can create as many of these subaccounts as you need, and you can choose to let mail sent to any of those addresses come through to your inbox or else block it completely. SpamSlicer also offers a conventional set of antispam filters to reduce the quantity of junk mail you get. The service costs $2.95 a month, or $17.50 if you sign up for a year. PERMISSION DENIED. ChoiceMail, from DigiPortal Software, takes the one approach that's guaranteed to block all spam, but many people will find that it's not worth the trouble. When you receive mail, ChoiceMail checks the message against your lists of permitted and blocked senders. If the name is on either list, it acts accordingly. If it's not, the program dispatches a message asking the sender to request your permission to send you mail. Of course, the robots that send out most mass mailings will not be able to respond to the request. And if a human being does respond, you still have the option of granting or denying the request. Because it's completely permission-based, ChoiceMail can promise to let through all the mail you want to see, and only the mail you want to see. But the procedure has a lot of fuss, both for you and for your correspondents. I think that really makes it useful only for people who can limit their e-mail to a relatively small and predictable list of correspondents. It also requires you to explicitly add to your "permitted" list any mailing lists you want to receive. EXTREME APPROACHES. ChoiceMail costs $39.95 and works with standard Windows e-mail programs, though its automatic-configuration feature works only with Outlook Express and Eudora. For businesses wanting to use confirmation-based spam control, Gordano offers a product called GLWebMailXT as an add-on to its mail server. These are more extreme approaches to spam fighting, and they won't be everyone's cup of tea, but they can be effective for hard-core users. Until we find a way to cut off the junk at the source, do-it-yourself spam fighting is the only way to go.  Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for BusinessWeek. Follow his Flash Product Reviews, only on BusinessWeek Online Edited by B. Kite Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | AUGUST |
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