Ask e-mail users what their main complaint about electronic mail is, and you'll likely get a resounding answer: spam. Spam -- the word used to describe unwanted, unsolicited e-mail -- has seriously affected the productivity of everyone who relies upon e-mail today.
Just about any study that addresses the cost of spam in wasted time estimates that people lose anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour each day sorting through unwanted e-mail. That translates into big money.
"Where I work, folks aren't exactly cheaply paid. If they spend even a half hour on junk mail, that's expensive," Joshua Thorner, an e-mail administrator at a Maryland-based technology firm, said.
There's help available, though, in the form of anti-spam software. Anti-spam software has been around for some time, and people haven't adopted it en masse in part because even the best of the packages have not been without faults.
Faults still exist in today's anti-spam solutions, but they're fewer in number. More importantly, though, spam has become such a nuisance that it's worthwhile including one of the top-rated anti-spam packages in your PC toolbox.
Among the best programs is McAfee's SpamKiller (http://www.spamkiller.com). SpamKiller operates the way most anti-spam tools do. You tell it about your e-mail accounts -- providing user name, password, incoming (POP) and outgoing (SMTP) server addresses -- and then you allow the program to check your mailboxes.
The program inspects the list of waiting messages and checks those messages against a database of known spammers. The program also flags messages as likely spam by recognizing certain tactics that spam senders use.
How to kill an e-mail
For example, e-mail messages will be flagged as spam if they contain the words "lose weight," "no obligation," "free money," "work from home" or any of a number of other phrases common in spam e-mail.
Other characteristics of spam messages -- including empty subject lines and hidden recipients -- are also used as criteria for identifying spam.
Once possible spam messages are identified, you're given the opportunity to send an automated complaint, return an error message to fool the sender into thinking that your address is not valid, or delete the message outright.
Unlike some anti-spam programs, however, SpamKiller saves much more of your time than it wastes. The program is smart enough to inspect your address book and allow all messages from those in your address book as well as most legitimate sources come through.
SpamKiller is available in a trial version. The full version costs about 30 dollars.
MailWasher (http://www. mailwasher.net) serves the same function as SpamKiller, but does not include some of SpamKiller's transparency.
MailWasher bounces spam messages, attempting to trick the sender into believing that you do not exist. The tool will not automatically send complaint messages, and it forces you to do more work in discerning good messages from bad. But it's free, and over time the program can help you to reduce the amount of spam you receive.
One of the most novel approaches to fighting spam, however, comes from a relatively new company called Cloudmark (http://www.cloudmark.com). The company's SpamNet is intended to do for spam fighters what Napster did for those looking to share music files.
Communal approach
This time, though, there's no illegality involved. The concept of SpamNet is simple: provide a system whereby e-mail users everywhere can band together to determine what is spam and what is not. The communal approach results in a huge database of known spammers, and the result is a program -- SpamNet -- that can potentially get rid of more spam than any other on the market today. The only catch is that presently SpamNet works solely with Microsoft's Outlook 2000, 2002, or XP e-mail program.
Here's how it works: You download SpamNet, which is free. SpamNet sets up a spam folder in Outlook and installs Block and Unblock buttons. The program automatically checks mail against the SpamNet database of known spam messages. Spam gets shoveled automatically into the spam folder.
If any spam gets through the initial filtering process, you simply highlight the message and click the Block button. If other users also identify that same message as spam, SpamNet will automatically prevent the e-mail from reaching others, instead redirecting it to their spam folders.
If, as with other anti-spam programs, SpamNet erroneously identifies a legitimate e-mail message as spam, you're free to retrieve it from the spam folder. Simply highlight the message, click Unblock, and it is moved automatically to your inbox. The program, however, is amazingly effective, and soon you'll probably be checking your spam folder much less often.
When you finally see your inbox free of spam, you may once again see e-mail as the useful tool it used to be.
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