Every day, both domestic and corporate users of the internet
receive considerable amounts of spam e-mail. They are not only annoying but
sometimes you can miss an important e-mail or newsletter simply because you
lose it among the great number of e-mails that flood out your Inbox. Often,
you'll find that important people neglect to read your e-mail because busy
people like them hardly have the time and patience to browse through the huge
quantities of spam mail they receive.
One solution to this problem is a filter or a free spam
blocker. Many companies have designed filters for their customers. Many e-mail
servers, especially the renowned ones that have a reputation to protect, have
their own free spam blocker. There are several types of programs that can help
you stop spam, including:
- the ones that are offered when you create a new e-mail
address. Every company that provides e-mail service has a spam filter,
including those that offer free accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and so
forth.
- there are also standalone programs that go through your
mail folders regularly and do their best to separate valid e-mail from spam and
unwanted mail. The main disadvantage with these free spam blockers is the fact
that, when they do their checks, they use quite a large percentage of your
computer's resources and sometimes also of your bandwidth. Before installing
this kind of free spam blocker, you'll need to decide if this is okay with you.
- other types of free spam blockers are the ones that work
as plug-ins to other programs like e-mail clients. The disadvantage with this
kind of approach is that you need to download all your mail anyway, before the
plug-in can do its stuff.
When you decide to use a filter, you must be sure that you
update it or install new versions regularly, because marketing researchers
working for spammers are continuously developing new ways of 'fooling' the
filters. Filter makers must keep up by improving their software accordingly.
A free spam blocker works by looking for trigger words or
phrases inside the text of the e-mails, and categorizing e-mails on that basis.
Nowadays, there are special programs being created that are designed to pass
spam through free spam blockers by re-arranging words or using a different
language style in the e-mails. This is an unfair marketing strategy, of course,
but if you want to be protected against it, you must always have an up-to-date
version of your free spam blocker program.
Specialists recommend that you should review your needs and
see what kind of filter suits you best. Each approach has its advantages and
disadvantages. You must make up your mind whether you want to use the default
filter on the e-mail server, or if you want to download all your mail before
scanning them, or if you are willing to share your bandwidth with a standalone
application. The best way is, of course, if you can blend all the programs in
one, but that's not always practicable. Still, it is advisable that you should
not remain satisfied with the free spam blocker that your e-mail server
provides, because you will probably continue to receive unwanted mail in spite
of it. Using a plugin in addition to server-side filters is viewed by many
experts as the most effective way of getting rid of spam, considering the
trivial effort it takes to set up.
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