Download Spam Blocker Now And Stop Spam Immediately
by Julia Gulevich
Not everyone
will like changing his email address to get rid of spam
because many people share their email addresses with their friends, colleagues,
subscribers, and customers. They also may have business cards and other
material with the email addresses printed on them. Moreover, getting a
new email address won't free you from spam forever. It
will work the first time while your email is new. But as far as you will
be using it to communicate with your contacts, the spam flow coming to
that email address will be growing. So, how to combat spam? Where is the
right solution? One of the effective ways to combat spam is using an anti-spam
filter. Fortunately, there are a lot of anti-spam tools available on the
Internet.
I am using
the anti-spam filter is called SpamCombat.
For me, it's a "must-have" tool. I've been using it for about 2 years
and my statistics show that 80% of emails I receive are deleted by SpamCombat.
The particularity
of SpamCombat is that it works at the source i.e. it
connects directly to your inbox on the server and manages the emails there.
It's not the same when you are using the filters in your email software,
for example Outlook or Thunderbird. The major difference is that SpamCombat
deletes spam and junk emails on the email server so that you never have
to download them. Using an anti-spam filter in Outlook, for instance,
would mean that you have to pull down the messages onto your computer
first and then analyze and manage them accordingly. This may pose a threat
if some emails contain viruses.
SpamCombat is easy
to use. It'll take just a few minutes to set it up. The downloadable version
of SpamCombat will never expire so you have plenty of time to decide if
it is working for you. SpamCombat is provided with 6 filters, which detect
spam emails with great accuracy and precision. You can customize the filters
for your needs. On the company's user forum there is a topic dedicated
to SpamCombat filters:
http://www.justlan.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=937
The program
users gratefully share their filters with others and I found many useful
anti-spam filters there. I added some of them
to my SpamCombat installation and the amount of spam that was identified
increased to 80%. This means that on average, 3 of every 10 emails I receive
are legitimate and are allowed through by SpamCombat. The rest are deleted
at the server and I don't have to spend time downloading them. This is
a big deal if you are using dialup access to the Internet.
There is a concept
of a blacklist and a whitelist. You can "whitelist" and "blacklist" the
emails by any field from the message header (not only by the From field
where the message sender's email address is) and by any word or phrase
from the message content. SpamCombat will allow all emails through that
are on the whitelist, and it will mark for deletion or automatically delete
all those that are on the blacklist. Adding or removing someone from the
whitelist or blacklist is a very simple point and click exercise.
SpamCombat
also allows using wildcards and regular expressions to set legitimate
filters up. For example, if you specify all emails coming from your company
domain name as being legitimate, then all messages from your colleagues
will be allowed through without you having to specify each person. You
can achieve this by using a wildcard setting such as "*@youworkdomain.com".
This can also be used to blacklist an entire domain such that all messages
are immediately marked for deletion or automatically deleted depending
on your settings.
There is also the
Bayesian filter, self-learning system based on legitimate and spam emails
you receive. I trained the Bayesian filter well and now it identifies
my legitimate and spam emails in the proper way.
SpamCombat
also has more advanced filters. One of them is known as "DNSBL filter".
There are servers on the internet which list known spam addresses. When
you receive a message from one of these addresses, SpamCombat automatically
marks it as spam without your filters even being invoked. This is a remarkable
filter. It identifies about 10% of spam emails that I get.
Another
advanced filter is called Complex Filter. This
filter is based on the VBScript. If you are familiar with the VBScript,
you can write a script and add it to the Complex Filter. A nice filter
is described there: A
href= http://www.glocksoft.net/sc/discover-amazingly-powerful-anti-spam-filter/
The software configuration
is very flexible. You can choose a deletion mode for spam emails by yourself:
you can specify the emails to be deleted automatically without your participation,
or you can have the program mark them for deletion but let you preview
them just in case. This is important at the beginning until you tailor
the program for your mail.
You can
also set SpamCombat to move spam emails to the internal
program trash or delete them permanently. The emails will be stored in
the trash for a number of days depending on your settings. There is also
a way to recover an email from the trash and receive it with your regular
email client.
SpamCombat is independent
software and does not interfere with your email client. It sits in the
system tray and does its work thoroughly. On my computer, it checks my
inbox every 20 minutes and notifies me that new emails arrived. I then
review them and do a cleanout. I have my email client setup to only receive
messages when I instruct it to so that SpamCombat has the most opportunity
to do its work.