| Reply : 16 Sep 2008 Firstly, you need to accept that you'll never be able to eliminate spam entirely, but you can find ways of filtering and managing it. The main reason spam is such a problem is that the standard used for email on the internet (the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP) allows the sender to say who they are without any verification, so for example you or I could easily pretend to be gordon.brown@pm.gov.uk. The protocol was originally developed in academic networks - no one ever saw why someone would pretend to be someone they weren't. The other reason of course is that it costs next to nothing to send a million emails, and there's always some idiot somewhere who'll respond!
The good news is that because spam is based around sending lots of emails while pretending to be someone you aren't, the messages tend to have characteristics which a specially designed computer program (a spam filter) can understand.
So, you need to have some spam filtering software. The best place for this is on your email server, because then the spam is filtered out before it gets anywhere near you so you don't have to download it. Any half-decent ISP will have spam filtering on their servers, so the first suggestion is to find out how to turn it on. It should be documented somewhere under the provider's FAQs, and you can usually enable it by logging in to whatever web control panel the provider gives you. If in doubt, phone your ISP (if you have your own domain name, it'll normally be the people who host your website you need to call, who might not be the same people who provide your internet connection). If they don't provide spam filtering, consider changing provider!
If you do use your provider's spam filtering, remember to log in to whatever mechanism they provide (usually some kind of web-based email) to check your spam filter regularly in case of false positives!
The next-best thing is to do your own spam filtering on your PC. There are lots of products out there, including stuff from the big anti-virus vendors like McAfee, Sophos, Symantec and AVG. They all have their pros and cons, my advice would be to download a couple of free trials and see which you like. They work by plugging in to your email software (e.g. Outlook) and filtering messages as they come in. You can also use an email program such as Mozilla Thunderbird (which I use) which has built in junk mail filters, which are pretty good.
The other thing you should do whatever solution you use is to use any features available to teach the software to recognise emails by marking them as junk, moving them to a junk folder etc, and to unmark anything which the software thinks is junk but actually isn't.
So, last thing - what do I use? Well, I run my own mail server, using Kerio MailServer, which is a fantastic bit of kit if you have a small business and want things like shared calendars, contacts etc. Kerio has a very good built-in anti-spam feature. And, I also use Mozilla Thunderbird, which has its own features as I mentioned. The odd spam still gets through, but it's little enough that it doesn't really cause me any problems.
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13).jpg&maxW=50&maxH=50&action=crop "Fraser J. Hay")