Internet email has not only spread with incredible speed in recent years, it has also taken on an amazingly central role in our lives. It has had a transforming affect on organizational structure, and many enterprises today structure their entire business process around the flow of email. Email is how we stay in contact with our customers, our suppliers, our colleagues, our friends, and our family members. It is hard for some of us to remember how we conducted our lives before email.
Therefore, It is unfortunate that just as we have come to depend heavily on our email, it has come under attack from organizations that want to fill our in-boxes with unwanted junk mail. In communications theory, one speaks of the signal-to-noise ratio--the relative proportion of meaningful communication to interference and static. One blessing of email has been its very high signal-to-noise ratio. Email messages tend to get straight to the point; replies are just as direct and timely. Email worked for us because it was meaningful.
The huge amount of unwanted junk mail now circulating on the Internet, however, threatens the very effectiveness for which we value email. Some new users are so turned off by the barrage of junk mail that greets them as soon as they sign up for an email account that they never get a chance to experience the power that email can provide.
Junk email goes by many names. Colloquially, it is most often referred to as "spam" (due to its resemblance to the Monty Python song whose lyrics consist entirely of repetitions of that single word: "spam, spam, spam, spam....") Because the word "Spam" is more properly reserved to describe a proprietary food product produced by Hormel, the Internet community has not been able to follow colloquial usage and settle down to agree on use of the word as a reference to junk on the Net. Many workarounds have been proposed. The Internet Mail Consortium has proposed the acronym UBE, for Unsolicited Bulk Email. Seattle Lab is an active member of the Internet Mail Consortium and supports IMC efforts.
Email technology has made it very simple and inexpensive for a sender to transmit huge amounts of outgoing email, for which the recipient must, essentially, pay the postage. In addition to the costs to the recipient, senders of junk mail also frequently hijack mail servers to act as "relays" for their mail.
In order to preserve the power and effectiveness of Internet email, we need to be able to separate the signal from the noise. Government institutions have proposed attempts to regulate the barrage of junk, but it is highly unlikely that any governmental actions will achieve any substantial reduction in noise. Solutions need to be embedded in the Internet software itself.
SLmail has always been the leader in email server technology--SLmail was the first email server for Windows-- and Seattle Lab is committed to leading the fight to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of email, to make electronic communications as effective and powerful as it can possibly be.
SLmail is now the leader in anti-junk mail technology, and Seattle Lab is committed to leading the effort to allow email users to conduct their correspondence in peace.
SLmail contains three major elements to combat junk email:
Anti-relay protection to keep SLmail from being used to pass junk mail along
All of these features are fully configurable by the system administrator to allow you to have exactly the degree of protection or openness you desire.