Another weapon in the spam war

If you can believe the numbers, Ferris Research estimates spam will cost U.S. corporations $10 billion in 2003. Software vendor MailWise says up to 67% of all email in the last 30 days was spam and spam costs U.S. businesses $600 million each month.

Even if those numbers were only half true they would be pretty staggering.

Our Technology Update author (dstrickler@mailwise.com) this week looks at the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a valuable too to battle spammers. The idea being that an AI-based systems can more effectively and quickly adapt to spammers ever-changing ways.

According to our author, natural language processors can serve as powerful AI tools in the fight against spam. These processors, which are actually an array of complex algorithms, scan an e-mail message as a human would to learn about the content of the message. The algorithms are packaged into mail filtering software, which generally sits outside the firewall or at an ASP.

AI mail filtering software accepts all in-bound e-mail traffic, routing legitimate traffic to a corporate SMTP server and flagging other messages as spam. Suspect e-mail is sent to a quarantine area where an administrator can view the contents to determine whether to discard it or pass it along.

An array of weapons is needed to fight spam, AI is just one more.

For more on this story see: https://www.nwfusion.com/tech/2003/0414tech.html