If you think you’ve been getting more SPAM in your mailbox lately, you’re right.
In June 2003, Network World determined that 69% of email sent was SPAM - (up from 50% from a similar test in February)

This is confirmed with live monitoring done by Postini, one of the world’s largest SPAM filtering companies who currently show a rate of 72.8% SPAM.

In an effort to manage junk mail, I’ve tried out a number of solutions with varying results.
For a month, I switched my entire email system to the new version of Mozilla which incorporated a “learning mode” SPAM trap. This was fairly effective, but try as I might, it could not learn to junk all messages that had anything to do with Viagra.

SPAM ASSASSIN (as supplied on our hosting accounts) still was pretty effective, but as it operates on a set of defined “rules”, fine tuning the individual settings to suit your purposes is fiddly and time consuming.

I’m currently using Eudora 6, whose new Bayesian SPAM filtering engine works like a charm. As soon as it was installed, it correctly selected over 80% of SPAM messages.

After a few days of simply “telling” it a bit more about what I considered to be SPAM, my inbox is virtually SPAM-free. In the past 4 days, only 12 out of 638 SPAM messages actually made it to my inbox. The rest were silently diverted to a “junk” folder where they could be reviewed.

The “JUNK” folder contained about 15 newsletters and other messages that I wanted to keep, so I just marked these as “Not Junk”. Eudora will remember this s for next time.

Eudora 6 contains the easiest to use, most effective SPAM tool that I have ever seen. I had to pay $US39.95 to upgrade to the latest paid version, but the time saved by its effective SPAM control makes it a great investment.

I must admit that I am biased towards Eudora - I’ve been using it for several years because it is fast, powerful, and is unaffected by all of the viruses that are specially written to wreak havoc on Microsoft Outlook users.

There are similar SPAM detecting add ons available for Microsoft Outlook. One that has won many awards is available at www.inboxer.com costs$US24.95, but there is a free 21 day trial.

Another alternative is for WebAngel to divert all server mail through a very effective commercial filtering system. This would add a few dollars a month to the cost of a hosting account. would you be prepared to pay this to free your inbox from around 95% of SPAM? Please leave your comments by clicking on the link under this post.

Regards,
WebAngel.