Spam Free In Outlook

Criminal and illegal spam

One class of spam that is becoming increasingly common is what proposes a clearly criminal action, or promotes a product or service that may be illegal. This type of spam promotes being Spam free in outlook by using a good Outlook spam filter. There is room for argument that this mail is not spam, but it is our belief that most people would not make this distinction and that any efforts taken to cut or end “standard commercial” spam will also be applicable to this type, for example using a free Outlook Express spam blocker. Because this, we propose to include this class of spam explicitly in our definition.

Twisting the meaning of “unsolicited”

A complication in any attempt to define spam is what exactly we mean by the word “unsolicited”: a common argument from pro-spam and Direct Marketing Organizations is that there are situations where a pre-existing business relationship exists between a customer and a vendor- which a Microsoft Outlook spam filter may or may not catch - for example, in the case where a customer has given his e-mail address as part of the process of buying goods from the vendor’s web site. Many major anti-spam organizations and anti-spam software for Outlook support that promotional e-mail must only be sent to customers who have explicitly agreed to get it by deliberately checking a control in authorization, and that the default state of that control must be “unchecked”. This process is known as “opting-in”, it is one of the basic issues that must be confronted in any initiative that aims to control spam and be Spam free in outlook.

A tentative definition

Because the last discussion, we now offer a tentative definition of spam that we can use as a basis for further discussion:

Spam: An electronic communication containing relevant or references to material of a commercial, solicitation or illegal nature, directed as part of a bulk distribution to any address where the address holder has not given explicit prior consent to get it.

Things that look like spam but aren’t

Much mail that is considered spam, phishing, or email fraud by the public is not in fact spam, and could not be controlled by any formal anti-spam initiative including wanting to be Spam free in outlook. The most important example of this is Viral Vector mail – messages that try to lure the recipient into running an executable attachment, or that use weaknesses in the HTML making facilities of common mail programs to execute code without the recipient’s knowledge. This mail typically leads to the recipient’s computer being “infected” and in the Viral Vector message being forwarded to everyone in the recipient’s address book.

Many Viral Vector messages use spam-like enticements to encourage the recipient to begin their payloads – for example, promises of pornographic media, however some Naive Bayesian filtering can prevent this. It is also common for these messages to try to obscure their payload by manipulating filenames so that only an innocuous part shows in the recipient’s mail program (“Anna-Nicole Smith Nude.JPG.exe”, for example), or by putting the payload into a ZIP file to bypass antiviral protections.

It is worth stressing that controlling the spread of Viral Vector e-mail cannot be part of any concerted anti-spam initiative or wanting to be Spam free in outlook and as such this mail is outside the scope of this discussion: we mention it here only to distinguish it from spam. However, a new technology called Markovian Discrimination that is found in CRM114 is able to distinguish all types of messages, including Viral Vector e-mail.

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