Making Short Work of Spam

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If the Internet really were an "information superhighway," wed need a legion of censors to stand guard at every offramp, manning checkpoints to block unsolicited commercial mail that might otherwise choke local streets and home mailboxes. If you wanted to make your own rules, youd have to hire your own mailbox monitor.

But the Net is better than any noncyber network: We need only a few centers of expertise, such as the one at Brightmail Inc., that can use decoy mailboxes to identify new spam patterns and push corresponding anti-spam rules to services such as EarthLink Inc.s Spaminator.

Brightmail claims that "six of the top 10 ISPs" use its products, making this enterprise-class technology available to individuals and small businesses.

We havent seen a single false-positive diversion, but almost no spam has reached our Spaminator-protected account. Its easy to check our Web-based spam storage during the 10-day message holding period so that no desired mail will ever be lost—and we can redirect desired mail, if needed, so that our rejection rules are correspondingly revised.

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