As systems administrators, we abhor spam. It bogs down servers, floods our personal mailboxes, and wastes our user’s time. As web content providers, we also are extremely annoyed that email contact information is blatently reaped and abused. The Internet can be so much more than a cesspool of spam. On the other hand, the Internet does not need government control over content. Services like Cloudmark walk through the horns and give us tools to defeat spam, yet avoid government regulation. If you don’t have easy access to server-side controls, Cloudmark is invaluable. If you do, Cloudmark may still add value. Do check out Cloudmark. From their website:

Cloudmark is a company that empowers consumers to fight spam in a way that has not been possible until now. Cloudmark’s groundbreaking, peer-to-peer (P2P) solution already delivers immediate spam relief to tens-of-thousands of people, processing millions of email messages each day around the world. The company’s flagship product called SpamNet is the first collaborative spam reporting network capturing nearly every spam attack around the world in real-time to automatically keep 75 percent of spam out of peoples’ inboxes – a percentage that will improve overtime as the network grows. SpamNet is a key component of Cloudmark’s efforts to counter the accelerating spam problem for consumers, ISP’s and Enterprises in a cost effective way. The company is leapfrogging traditional anti-spam companies and their old techniques by fighting a distributed problem with a distributed solution.