LONDON, November 8 /PRNewswire/ --
    - With Photo
    The battle for the email inbox is heating up as spammers become more
creative in their quest for our time and money. Likewise anti-spam systems
are evolving to counter this ever-increasing conflict.
    "We have worked tirelessly in recent months to build what we believe is
the world's most advanced anti-spam system, so that we can put the spammer
on the defensive and save our customers a lot of money to boot," says Chris
Ball, Managing Director of Efinity Server creator SMT Network Solutions, at
the launch of Efinity 5, "our aim is to bring the highest level of security
protection to businesses across the world."
    The Efinity server, winner of the DTI Smart Award for Innovation,
provides a whole raft of services, with the latest Efinity 5 version taking
functionality to a whole new level.
    As the battle grows so do the casualties: businesses and individuals
without adequate anti-spam protection are already counting the costs.
    It is a constant race between the spammers and the spam defenders. "The
battle is on and we are continually modifying our systems to defend our
customers from this very annoying and costly problem" comments Steve Ball,
Technical Director of SMT Network Solutions, "over the last few years we
have seen the techniques used by the spammers change and we have had to
change to counter their attacks."
    As the use of blackhole lists increased, many spammers switched to
"zombie machines" (computers that have been taken over by a hacker, often
through a trojan infection) so that the origin of the spam was not on a
blackhole list. As header analysis improved spammers stopped caring that
the origin of the email was hidden.
    Today the spammers are switching to the use of animated graphics to
prevent optical character recognition systems from reading the content of
graphical images.
    Why do the spammers go to so much trouble to get their message across?
The answer is simple; many people still buy from spam. A recent survey by
toptenreviews.com stated that 8% of spam recipients buy from spam email -
making it very profitable!
    The problem for businesses is that company time and money is being lost
as employees not only open these emails, but read and respond to them as
well.
    The level of viruses on the internet, whilst still extremely high, has
started to decline recently due to the increased number of people that have
anti-virus protection. In order to curb the rise of email spam a similar
approach is needed.
    Estimates of the number of spam emails vary, but with the lowest
figures quoted in excess of 12.5 billion emails being sent every day, in a
business worth billions of dollars, this is a battle that will continue to
rage.
    A high-resolution photograph accompanying this release is available
through the PA Photowire. It can be viewed at http://www.mediapoint.press.net or
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk

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