Junked email ham 'worse than spam'

Some anti-spam filters are a case of the 'cure' being worse than the disease, according to web-hosting firm Strato.

People spend more time checking out their junk-mail folder for legitimate email, which the German company calls 'ham', than they do skimming through spam headers. Strato communications manager Carsten Zorger said: "People have to trust a filter or it is not worth using."

Strato naturally claims its email filter spots very nearly 100 per cent of spam with not a single false positive thanks to a partnership with Berlin's Humboldt University. The technology also works with phishing email, which is considered to be a special case of spam, though there are specific techniques to tackle the problem.

Chief technology officer Rene Weinholtz says that in addition to standard spam-spotting algorithms, the latest version uses a technique known as 'social graphing' which analyses patterns of communication between addresses.

All the data is hash-coded and anonymous so there is no loss of privacy. " But there is no point simply stopping the kind of spam you get now. The people who send spam are very clever and they are finding new ways all the time to get past filters."

The company, which reckons 80 per cent of the email going through its servers is spam, plans to introduce artifical intelligence techniques to tackle next-generation junk mail.

Strato offers the  service to customers in the UK . Capacity allocated for a website can also be used for off-site storage, for which Strato provides facilitating software.