What is Spam?
Spam is unwanted email flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

How Does It Work?

• ALRnet’s Anti-Spam Engine looks through each email you receive and compares it to a pre-existing rule set* of known spammer tricks.
• The Engine uses a points system. When email comes in with “Viagra” on it, it is assigned a certain point value. When the same email comes in 10 times from the same source, that's another point value. When the engine tags each email with a certain number of "points", it considers it spam
• If the spam email does not fit the current rule set, the filtration system will study the email and generate a new rule set based on the new spam received.
• The filtration system has a small chance of false positives (good email marked as spam) due to the intelligent engine used to examine email.

Note: A Rule Set is a conditional statement that tells the system how to react to a particular situation.
 

What are Spam tactics?

• Spammers have been documented as stealing other site's domain names via email forgery.
• Spammers solicited donations for relatives of the victims of the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks on the USA.
• Spammers supply a phone number that you are supposed to call to be removed. The call can cost $2 per minute.
• Spammers will sell someone a mailing list and tell them that the people on it want advertising e-mail.
• Spammers will embed viruses and applications to exploit your mail and computers.

How does Spam impact business?
Businesses are constantly looking for ways to prevent fraud, waste and abuse, and increase productivity and stopping Spam is one way to achieve this. Time spent receiving, reading and deleting spam is wasted time. It also consumes network, hardware, and software resources. The rate of Spam on the Internet doubles every six months and costs millions of dollars to process. An estimated 50% of all email on the internet is spam and is growing. Reading and deleting spam is the quickly becoming one of the largest areas that business owners are concerned about. Employees waste countless hours a month reading and deleting spam.