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Now
I tried using "Bayesian" and other filter systems, but all this did was just move most
of the Spam, all my
newsletters, and some of my real email, into a Junk folder and still left me with
Spam in my inbox. This still meant that I was being
exposed to all these amazing offers, not to mention the
pictures, as I had to continually review my Junk folder
to check for real emails. What's the point? Next
I tried using a Challenge Response System, you know the
type - SpamArrest, Choicemail. Well these worked to a
point, but again I had a real problem with any ezines I
wanted to subscribe to. Also I found that spammers are
now starting to exploit a loophole in this system where
by they spoof the sender address of the email to make it
appear as though it has come from an "already
verified address". Worse still, once this happens
you can't stop these spammers - without totally
blocking the friend that they are impersonating. Short
of asking my friend to change their email address it was
hopeless. Lastly this type of system also inconvenienced
all my customers. As I am running a business and have an
email address on my site, anyone who wanted to send me
an email was subjected to this challenge system. I
could see that this type of system had merit, but the idea
was to inconvenience the spammers, and not my friends or clients. Well
I thought there has to be something better than having
to change my email address every few months. (Now that's
a thought - but more on that later.) Anyway I set about
to see if I could come up with a better solution, one
that actually allows legitimate people to freely send me
email while blocking off the Spammers - my objective was
to inconvenience the spammer, while keeping the solution
transparent to myself and my friends. So
I thought OK, what is the difference between a Spam and
a legitimate message? Well for starters, Spam seems to originate from
anywhere in the world, while my legitimate messages
originate from my part of the world.
Now I know that you can't judge everyone by yourself,
but I imagine that most people, like me, receive the majority of their email from
their local area as that is where their friends and
relatives live. The
only problem was that I run a global business so I
didn't have the luxury of isolating myself from the rest
of the world with my new Spamborders. What I needed was
a way of identifying senders that legitimately
had possession of my email address, whether it be via my
website, or via a reply to a message that I had sent
them. Unfortunately an email address is a little like a
secret - the moment that you tell it to someone you lose
control of it. What
I needed was a way of controlling the secret - a way to
change the key as it were - should the secret fall into
the wrong hands. What if I were to embed a unique
key into every instance of my email address, whether it be obtained from my web site, a
newsgroup posting, or the reply address of an email that
I sent. Then whenever I received an email from outside
of my Spamborders I could check to see if it contains a valid,
previously issued key. Now, as each of my friends
receives their own unique key, I can control who can
send to me by expiring any keys that may fall into the
wrong hands - without the need and inconvenience of
changing my email address. For that matter, I can
periodically automatically expire any keys that where
issued from my web site before they get sold to some
Spammer somewhere. So
what I needed was a way to encode a unique sequence into
my email address in such a way that it would be
compatible with the Internets email system, post offices,
and most importantly, peoples address books. And then
what I needed was a way to
recognize these emails, and have them delivered directly
to my inbox.
How could this be achieved? What
if I capitalized some of the letters of my email address
so that it became a combination of upper and lower case?
Might look a bit funny but how many combinations of
email addresses would I get? Well it turns out that from
my email address which is 18 characters in length I
could generate in excess of 260,000 unique combinations
of my email address. Cool,
I don't have that many friends so that would last me a
long time and I would effectively change my email
address with every email that I send, without actually changing my email
address. Might just work. So
how would it work with ezines as this seemed to be one
of the major drawbacks of any of the other systems I
tried. Well I figure that I could issue each ezine I
subscribe to with its own unique upper and lower cased
version of my email address. That way these newsletters
will get straight into my inbox. It also had the added
advantage of letting me know if one of these ezines gave
away or sold my email address. Perfect. So
far so good, but what about any emails that didn't use a
cased version of my email address (need a name for this
- how about CaseKeys?) and were from outside my local
geographic area. Well as I mentioned before, I think
that the challenge / response systems had some merit so
perhaps we could utilize this type of technology. Yes,
I think that has promise. But what about the spoofing of
verified addresses problem that I mentioned before. Hmm,
well if I use this challenge response system only as a
way to verify real people and then issue them with their
own CaseKey version of my email address, then I could
expire the verification after a month or so. That
way if the person wants to send to me again, they have
their own unique version of my email address to use and
I don't have to worry about spammers spoofing the
email addresses of my verified senders. Excellent, this
CaseKey technology is turning out to be very cool. So
that is how Geobytes 'm.. came about. "m" as we call it,
does all of the above, with it's CaseKey Technology and geographic
Spamborders it is two generations ahead of anything
else. Geobytes 'm... is
without question, (in my humble opinion) the best
solution available today. But
I don't expect you to take my word for it.
Take advantage of our free trial. You can download
it now and regain control of your inbox in 2 minutes. Try it
now, your spam is not going to go away. Once you do, be
sure to let me know what you think.
I would love to hear any feedback that you have. You
can contact me directly using my CaseKeyed email address
( ADrIAn@GeoBYTes.CoM )
or better still you can use our forums
page to post any questions, comments or feedback that you may
have, and then everyone will get to see it. By
the way, you may be interested to know why did I call it
'm...?
Well 'm... is the end of
Spam and also,
Spam ends with
'm...
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