Prevention is the Best Medicine
Prevention is the best medicine when it comes to spam, but it is not always possible to prevent the spam. If you find that you have spam every day and want to stop it, the below remedies will work for you.
What is A Spam Filter?
A Spam Filter is one of the many ways people have come up with to fight the spam problem. All filters require some sort of setup, but once they are setup you should not get hardly any spam ( if any depending on the filter setup ). Outlook express has some filtering options, but they are weak and unreliable.
How Can Spam Be Filtered In Outlook Express?
Outlook Express has filters built in, but they require you to configure and play with them quite a bit to get to them to work smooth. Also, they are only text based, so unlike some of the professional filters, they do not check your emails to see if the senders are in any of the spam blacklists. Blacklists are a list of known spam friendly servers and many programs test mail based on these lists.
If you cannot afford a professional filter, or only get 1 or 2 spam emails a day, then you can set up the outlook express filters manually. Click on Tools, Message Rules, Mail and add a new filter, adjusting it to your liking.
What is an Exclude List?
Exclude lists are the best spam filters. An exclude list rejects ALL email unless the sender is on your "safe" list. Spammers will not be on your list, so can't get through to you. When someone is not on the list, usually a question is sent to them, asking them why they want to contact you. Once they answer you are allowed to review the email and decide if they will be allowed on your accept list or not. This method is extremely effective in cutting down spam, but provides a slight hassle for customers if you have many unknown emails coming to you. This is the best known way to stop spam.
Can You Recommend Spam Filter Software?
There are many good programs out there that you can use to help manage spam problems. We've been using www.glocksoft.com's free version for several months now and it has significantly reduced spam. The free version only allows one account at a time to be protected, but it works perfectly.
Choicemail is another peice of ingenious software that appears to work extremely well too. We like both of these, and for the extremely low cost, both do an excellent job.