Book Review: Anti-Spam Tool Kit

Email is a great tool allowing virtually instant communication around the globe. However, the functionality of that communication is sometimes overshadowed by the tremendous amount of unsolicited spam email. Messagelabs reported that over 60% of the email traversing the Internet in the first half of 2004 was spam. I wrote Solving The Spam Epidemic (see links) earlier this year to highlight the issue as well. In order to use email effectively we have to weed out the spam first.

What's In The Book

The Anti-Spam Tool Kit covers a wide range of tools and techniques to help you combat spam at various levels and on differing operating systems and email clients.

The book opens with some basics including the history of the origins of the word spam and the basics of developing effective email policies and how spam and anti-spam work. It also discusses the different methods of anti-spam implementations such as client-based, server-based, etc.

The next section, called Building Your Anti-Spam Arsenal, talks about the use of DNS blacklists and other technologies and applications that you can use to combat spam such as SpamCop, Spamhaus and SpamAssassin including coverage of Bayesian filtering in SpamAssassin. It also covers how to configure various email client software to filter spam.

The third section contains details on a variety of anti-spam applications broken down by operating system. There are anti-spam tools for Windows, Macs and Linux as well as tools for Windows servers.

The book closes with some good information about how to fight spam in the long run and a glossary of definitions to help you decipher the various terms and acronyms.

My Review

There is no question that spam is a potential threat to the effectiveness of email as a form of communication and is at the very least an annoyance to anyone who uses email. To that end, a book like this contains valuable advice and information for virtually anyone. The detailed coverage of such a wide variety of tools and techniques- even covering tools for different operating systems and different levels of the network such as client and server- provides a comprehensive "tool kit" for the reader to employ in fighting spam.

The authors provide a sufficient amount of detail for the various tools for the reader to get a feel for their relative pros and cons and how to implement them. SpamAssassin is covered in much greater detail than many of the other products. Many of the tools and utilities covered in the book are included on the accompanying CDROM and are free so you can get right to work blocking spam as soon as you read the book.

There have been some changes in some email clients and the way ISP's handle spam as well as some legal challenges to the concept of RBL's (realtime blackhole lists) since this book came out, but with over 60% of all email being spam it is obvious that many people still need a resource like this.