There are many, many
commercial and freeware spam blocking software packages available. spam blocking
is a common concern, especially for businesses that run their own servers and
are seeing precious bandwidth and storage space eaten up by awaiting unsolicited
commercial email. For this reason, many high profile software companies like
Symantec have weighed in with commercial spam blocking solutions.
Generally these software
packages will give you the option to delete spam outright or funnel it into a
'junk' mail folder. To identify spam, they use one of three methods: Blocking
spam by examining the contents of the email for words and combinations of words
that indicate spam, blocking spam by using an updateable list of known spam
senders or blocking all email that does not come from approved sources
('whitelisting').
The major issue with all
spam-blocking software is false positives. In an ideal world, your software
would delete all spam before it even got to your inbox, and many current
programs are capable of doing just that. The trouble is, they will also
inevitably munch some email that you actually wanted to receive. The solution to
this, as it seems to be with all methods of spam filtering, is to funnel the
suspected spam into a separate folder where it can be checked occasionally
without interfering with workflow.
While there are too many
spam-fighting programs available for us to give how-to's on each one, most offer
free trial periods so you can get a sense of how they will work with your
computer. Also some free web browser alternatives to Internet Explorer (like
Mozilla) offer built in
spam filtering that is a bit more robust than the options included with Outlook
Express.
Some examples of commercial
antispam software include:
Norton Antispam
2004
Stata Lab's Saproxy
Pro
Giant's spam
Inspector 4
And Freeware antispam
software:
Extravalent's
POPFile
Using POPFile and Outlook Express message rules
to filter out spam email
As POPFile is one of the more
popular and mature open source mail filtering software packages, we thought we'd
give a quick tutorial on setting it up to sort your mail. Note that this
tutorial is not intended to replace reading the POPFile manual, and we recommend
you do that as well.
POPFile works by analyzing
your mail before it reaches your mailbox, then assigning it to a category
(bucket) depending on the contents of the message. It needs to be taught by the
user to recognize what is or is not spam at first, but it will 'learn' from the
choices you make and gradually become more efficient and independent.
Note that while POPFile can be
set to quarantine certain messages, it will not otherwise interfere with the
email reaching your client. It is a sorting program only, so it is good if you
are signed up to several newsletters which might otherwise stop being received
if they have to be manually authenticated. If you want something specific done
with the email than POPFile classifies as spam, for example, you will have to
create message rules to do this. Fortunately, POPFile can attach 'tags' to the
subject line of suspect emails so it is easy to sort them out. Let's take a look
at how to do all this...
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