Andrew Kent, CEO of messagecare talks with ABC Radio National

Sydney, Sunday 3rd August, 2003

Andrew Kent, CEO of messagecare, was invited to speak on ABC Radio National about spam, it's sources, how easy it is to send and what messagecare is doing to help.

Excerpt

Andrew Kent:"...You should never opt out of a spam message. There are a number of reputable companies that do provide legitimate opt out processes, and unless you're sure of the company you're dealing with and you're sure of their privacy policy, you should not opt out. Opt out only tells them again your email address is a valid email. So you should never opt out. Don't purchase anything, don't support them. If you get spam and you buy something, then you've contributed to the economy for spammers, and people will send you more spam.

Tim Latham: The best protection on offer is email filtering, and it's a booming business.
Andrew Kent says filtering email is a very tricky business, because like beauty, spam is in the eye of the beholder.

Andrew Kent: It's just very difficult to tell between spam and not spam. If you look at some spam messages, some people are interested in them and won't call them spam. Other people will. So I don't think you can ever get to 100% really, because of what users' perception is about spam. So we've taken an approach where we have to have captured spam in one of our spam traps. A spam trap really is an email address that we've set up around the world, and we have hundreds of thousands of these at the moment, collecting spam. The only reason these email addresses exist is to collect spam from the internet. Once we have collected spam, we can compare it against our users' email as we filter it, as it passes through from the ISP mail server to the user.

Tim Latham: MessageCare has planted 200,000 dummy email addresses since it started business in March. The sole purpose of all these addresses is to harvest spam. Every day 2-million messages are caught. These are fingerprinted and cross referenced against users' emails. If there's a match, then they've caught a possible spam.

Read the full interview