Yahoo’s recent announcement that they are to offer unlimited e-mail storage will come as good news to users but equally good news to those evil spammers. E-mail spam is one of the biggest problems on the internet, causing headaches for users and costing businesses billions of dollars each year filtering it from inboxes. We can’t offer you any billion dollar solutions but there are a few useful utlilities out there that could help you if you are sick of spam. Note that these only work if you’ve got your own POP3 account such as with Outlook – they won’t work with web based e-mail programs such as Hotmail or Gmail.
K9 AntSpam is an email filtering application that works in conjunction with your regular POP3 email program and automatically filters spam without the need for dozens of rules or constant updates. Over time, it uses statisitical analysis to ‘learn’ which e-mails are spam and which aren’t. The downside of this is that you might not notice results immediately but in the long-run, it should prove effective.
However, K9 doesn’t support SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connections so if you need this to connect to your e-mail server, you’d be better trying Spam Experts. Spam Experts features has the benefit of a cleaner, easier to use interface and it also supports IMAP clients. You should also notice results immediately with this installed.
These two programs are rather basic though, so if you’re looking for something a bit more sophisticated, you should consider installing a complete solution like Merak Email Server Suite. The interface is similar to Outlook but it has an arsenal of spam filters including SpamAssassin and ChallengeResponse which deal with various deifferent aspects of spam. The advantage of this is that it kills almost any spam coming through but this can also include group e-mails from friends.
Of course, if you’ve got a decent anti-virus program installed, then it should be able to do most things that these programs can do anyway. However, if spam still getting through, then these programs could act as a final line of defense.
