Glossary
Our online glossary of terms allows you to understand our email and internet specific jargon. If there is
any term that you are not familiar with and would like added to the glossary please contact support with
the request.
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Challenge and Response
The challenge and response method does not deliver mail messages to an end-user mailbox until
the sender is validated. This is done by having the system respond to the sender with a confirmation
e-mail. To gain acceptance to a challenge and response system, the sender's "reply-to" address has
to be "active" and the sender has to actually check the account, and verify his or her "person-hood"
by responding to the confirmation message. These systems function on the basis that a computer system
cannot decipher encryption. Proponents of this approach maintain that users will tolerate the extra
steps in order to be spared the inconvenience of spam; however, it must be remembered that the onus
falls on the authentic sender to confirm their existence. Hotmail
, AOL, and Yahoo
all use challenge and response tricks to prevent spammers from signing up for e-mail accounts in the first place;
spam filter vendors Safe Address, MailFrontier and Mailblocks also employ this approach.
Contextual Analysis
Contextual analysis searches scan messages for linguistic patterns that indicate
whether the message is an advertisement or part of a normal conversation. These
solutions can be temperamental and take time to configure and tune properly, but
some vendors indicate a very high block rates (as high as 98 percent) with few
or no false positives. Such solutions are becoming more common. An example of this
type of solution is IM Message Inspector from Elron Software.
Content Analysis
Content Analysis/Keyword Searching/Text Analysis: This approach involves analyzing the
text section of an email for character sequences that have already been classified as spam -
often, targeting specific keywords and phrases (e.g., sex, profanities, Nigeria, Viagra, etc.)
that are unlikely to appear in legitimate business correspondence.
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