Finally New Spam Prevention Product That Works!

Finally New Spam Prevention Product That Works!

by: Lee Traupel

Businesses and consumers are drowning in a neverending deluge of Spam (junk mail) according to reports just released by Quris, Inc. Spam has increased 450% from June of 2001 to now. Furthermore, 70% of respondents indicated they are receiving so much email in the form of Spam that itกs negating their acceptance and responsiveness to legitimate optin email messages (permission based). The average business user is forced to spend 2030 minutes a day wading through Spam clogged email inbox es trying to separate legitimate email from the junk in order to delete the latter.

Many companies have tried to offer Spam solutions that are based primarily on filtering technology. But, most of these products and services have not worked well in practice the ingenious spammers have learned work arounds by constantly changing their fake email addresses and text to avoid the blocking filters. Itกs been a war of attrition to date and the spammers have been wining so far!

I am pleased to report that one company has developed an elegant but simple solution that has blocked 100% of the Spam that was sent to me during a test period of five days. The company is DigiPortal Software, Inc. www.digiportal.com and their Spam killer application is called ChoiceMail. It works extremely well, is easy to setup and only costs $29.95 (introductory price) and they even offer a fourteenday trial period for no charge to test drive the product. And, the solution runs on your desktop and does not necessitate your working with a third party server and doesn’t require any service charges. Most importantly, it puts the burden of proof on the Spammers, forcing them to have your permission to contact you.

Here is how DigiPortalกs clever solution and software work: You download or purchase the software and install it on your PC (sorry PC version only right now) and setup your approval list by exporting your address book. From that point forward ChoiceMail automatically assumes all inbound email is Spam and it blocks any email that is not on an approved list that you have created.

If the email sender is on your approved list it makes it through to your inbox; if not, then ChoiceMail blocks the mail address and adds it to a rejection list and sends the sender a notification that you’re on a กpermission networkก and that he/she has to click through to a web site and send you a message by filling out a form that automatically forwards the personกs message to you, so you can elect to receive it or not.

DigiPortal is effectively acting as a trusted middleman in a process that reminds me of PGP (กPretty Good Privacyก) the defacto industry standard email security application that incorporates a similar process via a key held by a trusted third party. You’re ostensibly guaranteed never to receive any Spam based email as spammers will never receive your email, let alone reply to it most use automated systems that have no human intervention in the process. Itกs relatively painless for you to manage new contacts if you’re receiving inbound emails from a new a person (contact) that you have no existing relationship with, itกs easy to accept his/her request to reach you and the software also automatically updates your permission list.

ChoiceMail is an elegant solution that works well, is easy to use and solves a problem very cost effectively. There are a few hiccups with the software but, these are minor when you consider the significant benefits of the product and assuming the company will broaden its support for other applications in the near term. At present DigiPortal only works with standard ISPs such as Earthlink, ATT, etc. and with specific desktop clients including Outlook Express and Eudora no webbased email services (HotMail or Yahoo mail) work with the software yet and there is no support for AOL at present. My biggest complaint is that they don’t support a standard Outlook email you have to manually import your contact list from Outlook, which can be painstaking depending on the number of recipients in your address book. And, their initial focus is on the small business user or consumer, as they offer no support at present for the corporate enterprise.

About The Author

Lee Traupel has 20 plus years of business development and marketing experience he is the founder of Intelective Communications, Inc. www.intelective.com, a marketing services company. [email protected]. Reprinted with permission from Intelective Communications this article may be reprinted freely, providing this attribution box remains intact. (c) 20012002 by Intelective Communications, Inc.

This article was posted on July 31, 2002

by Lee Traupel