Weapons of Mass DistractionEmail Spam Software

Possibly the most annoying thing on the Internet is the amount of Spam I get. You can waste countless hours of your life manually deleting unsolicited commercial email. People trying to sell you Viagra, fake Rolexes, pornography, Breast/Penis enlargements, "free" gifts, and countless other things. As spam filtering techniques improve so do the methods the spammers use to bypass those filters. You have probably noticed that spammers seem to be unable to spell lately. This is because words like Viagra trip the spam detectors. The best thing I've used so far is from Cloudmark. It comes in a couple formats. The one you would most likely be interested in is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook. They also have enterprise anti-spam products which i have not tried, but are for protecting an entire mail server. This products work amazingly well. It adds a toolbar to your outlook, which has buttons to block spam, block fraud, and unblock. It works by generating a fingerprint of your incoming emails then comparing that fingerprint to known spam that has been reported to their server. Each user builds up a trust level based on how many emails they have correctly identified as spam. I am not sure how many people must block something before it gets automatically filtered out, but it depends on the trust level of the people that block it.

The real important part is how well it blocks spam. I have been using this software since it was in beta, and I have to admit it is nothing short of incredible. I have never seen it get a false-positive, and it very rarely misses a spam. Out of the 100 spam I recieved today, I think it missed one. It only takes one click to block that one message. The toolbar also has a button that will show you some statistics.. and I have shown a screenshot of a portion of mine below. Doing the math it looks like I've manually blocked about 5.7% of my total spam since I started using the program. You can't ask for much better than that. The amount of time and annoyance it saves me is worth way more than the few dollars a month it costs to have the service. They are offering a free trial, and I promise you won't want to live without it after using it for a while. Click the banner below to try it free. You have nothing to lose but unwanted spam email.

Check out cloudmark here.

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