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Spam has rapidly become the next big nuisance on the Internet. It is expanding in prevalence faster than most viruses and so are the associated costs. The costs are in lost productivity due to the time employees spend processing, reading, and manually filtering spam; lost emails that are accidentally deleted in the haystack of messages that each of us need to deal with to find our proverbial needle; and in the bandwidth that is used to transfer spam.

Spammers like their medium because the cost to contact hundreds of thousands of people is virtually nothing. Because of this no amount of legislation is going to deter these unethical practices. Business is therefore forced to take this upon itself.

There are finally, some solutions available that can stop the onslaught of spam. Many of these tools use black lists to stop spammers from being able to send from specific servers. This is a very effective mechanism so long as the spammer doesn't move or happen to use a server that you really want mail from such as Yahoo or Hotmail. Some systems force individual clients to create elaborate filters to dump mail messages with specific words or phrases in their content. An improvement on this system is yet another solution that uses special algorithms to try to gauge the content of a mail message as it comes into your server and gives it a score or rating that can be stopped by clients as well.

All of these systems can work but by themselves they are incomplete and difficult to manage. This is why Net Direct produced the SAVant Filter. SAVant uses a combination of all of the above mentioned technologies to stop spam from getting into your organization and in particular to your users.

1. Blacklists stop known spammers from even getting to your server
   
   
2. Common phrases and words stop many common spam messages
   
   
3. Virus filtering prevents client infection and potential breakouts in your company
   
   
4. Content algorithms that gauge the likelihood that a message is spam
   
   
5. User-definable settings allow for greater flexibility in controlling the aggressiveness of the filters

Unlike most other spam solutions however, SAVant does not simply pass altered messages off so the client can filter them, nor does it simply drop mail that it has tagged as spam. SAVant quarantines all tagged messages so administrators will have an opportunity to recall any messages that may have been tagged by mistake. An easy to use web client allows tagged messages to be browsed, deleted, sent through to the intended recipient, forwarded, white listed or blacklisted. Old spam can even be purged from the system automatically by setting the quarantine number of days.