Tips used for Top Tips come from the ExtremeTech forum and are written by our community.
Question from how786
“Can anyone recommend a good spam filter? I am deluged in spam solicitations.”
Answer from sseeger
“I just started using Spamihilator:
http://spamihilator.sourceforge.net/index2.php?lang=en
It comes with a lot of key words already defined. So far, Ive had pretty good success. (According to its statistics page, I get about 4 spams a day.) The best part is its FREE! This software works with almost any email program, because your POP client connects to Spamihilator, and then Spamihilator connects to your POP server.
One thing that I feel is missing: Better reporting – when an email is marked as spam, there is no way to see its “score”, or what words triggered it to be spam. This makes it difficult to figure out why an email has been incorrectly identified as spam.
Note – If you are always connected to the internet (cable/dsl/etc) deselect the checkbox “Bypass Connected State Checking” (under the Settings/Connection screen). If this is on, it does an HTTP GET to its own website every time you check your email. At first, I thought this was a usage counter, but really its just its way of seeing if its connected to the internet (I think).”
Answer from DragonMouth
“I have used both SpamBuster and MailWasher. Both are freeware. Both come with databases of known spammer addresses.
MailWasher will label incoming mail as “Original Blacklist” (the address is in the DB), “Blacklisted” (you added the address to the DB), “Possible Spam” (addresses suspected to be spam), “Normal Mail” (addresses that are not blacklisted or on the Friend list”, “Friendly Mail” (addresses you have designated as white list). You can blacklist a particular address or an entire domain. You can white list a particular address or an entire domain. To white list or blacklist, you right click on the message and choose an action from the drop down menu. MailWasher also offers a “Bounce” option which will bounce the messasge back at the spammer.
SpamBuster has four grades for incoming messages: Spam, Possible Spam, Friendly and Undefined (may not be the exact definitions but you get the idea). It has a built-in database of 40k+ known spammer addresses. You can add to it but the procedure is not as straight forward as MailWashers. SpamBuster has built in historical reports.
As to which I would recommend, it depends on what you want. MailWasher is simple to use, SpamBuster gives you more options but is a little harder to use. For somebody who just wants to have spam blocked and thats it, I would recommend MailWasher. For somebody who besides stopping spam wants to keep statistics on the spam, I would recommend SpamBuster. IMO they are equally effective in blocking spam. “
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