Filter Spam

Is Spam email robbing you of time and money?

(c)2005-2006 SpamStopping.com

Are you tired of wasting time dealing with all the spam email you receive every day? Or does your email filter mistakenly discard legitimate business email causing you to lose customer and sales?

If you do business on the Internet, it’s almost impossible to avoid getting spam email. Instead of wasting time deleting spam, you need to find an effective method of dealing with spam.

It’s estimated that the worldwide cost of spam email for Internet users is over $12.3 billion a year, primarily from time spent deleting unwanted messages.

And it doesn’t look the problem will go away any time soon.

This article will help you decide on the best email spam filter for your needs. Learn how make sure your legitimate email gets through without the headache of sifting through all the unwanted junk email.

The first decision you need to make is whether to allow your email to be filtered by your ISP or web hosting company (server-side filtering) or whether you want complete control over your own incoming messages (client-side filtering).

The major ISPs and free email providers are forced to filter your email in order to keep costs down. Email serving is resource intensive and without filtering, the costs of processing all that spam would be prohibitive.

If you business relies heavily on email communication, you probably shouldn’t leave your filtering in the hands of a free email server (like Hotmail or Yahoo) or one of the big ISPs like AOL or Comcast. Instead, for a small yearly fee you can set up your own domain with email.

You’ll need to find a hosting company that doesn’t automatically filter your email. When you have your own email account set up you can then take steps to reduce incoming spam and to apply your own filters to control your inbox.

Next you’ll need to decide what type of email filter you want to use. There are basically 3 types of filers:

  1. Baysian
  2. Challenge-response
  3. Rules based

1 - Baysian filters “learn” what you consider spam by analyzing messages that you mark as spam. These are probably the most personally accurate types of filters, but it does take some time to get to the point where you no longer have to “teach” the filter the rules.

2 - Challenge-response filters are only accept email from approved senders. When email arrives from someone who is not on your approved list of senders the sender automatically receives a message requiring a response to “prove” they are a legitimate sender. If they don’t respond, their email is not delivered to you.

With a challenge-reponse filter you’ll likely lose a good deal of your legitimate email unless you have a way of constantly monitor what is being discarded. Many senders won’t respond to the challenge and many opt-in and autoresponder return email addresses aren’t monitored so again, the challenge isn’t responded to and you don’t receive your messages.

3 - Rules based filters reject email based on rules like the inclusion of certain words in the message (”free” or certain body parts for example), too many exclamation points, certain types of HTML codes, etc. Many spammers can work around the rules so rules based filters aren’t always the most effective. You can also set up your own rules in many email clients and servers.

SpamStopping.com uses and recommends MailWasherPro.
MailWasherPro offers true control over how email is filter with settings that can be customized to your own preferences and adjusted to continue to reduce and eliminate spam.One of the best features of MailWasherPro is that email is sorted for review before it’s downloaded to your hard drive providing extra protection against viruses and worms.

Email is sorted into “friends” (whitelisted email addresses), “blacklisted” (email addressed added to the users own blacklist), or “origin blacklisted” (email address or domains that are listed on DNS blacklist servers). Additionally the header or email message can be previewed before downloading the email and message previews are text only so potentially harmful or offensive graphics are never mistakenly viewed.

At just $37 at the time of this review, MailWasherPro is an affordable and effective way to filter your email without giving up control of it. A free trial is available.