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Spam
Filters and Spam Blockers
Spam
has become a major problem for anyone using the internet
and as such there are many companies who have spent a
lot of time and effort to find effective ways of blocking
spam.
The end result of which is that there are many different
types of spam blocking and filtering systems now available
to internet users. The problem now is finding a good one
that works for you.
The
names for these anti spam software systems are as varied
as the approaches that the take to block spam.
Some
of the better known systems include (ranked from the top):
This
is not a complete list by any means, it is just some of
the spam blockers that we have tried out and they vary
in quality from excellent (spam arrest and Mailwasher
Pro) to not worth the money (imho).
We're
not going to try and review them all, simply to pick two
of the best to recommend.
These
are Spam Arrest and MailWasher Pro. Both systems are very
effective, although we did find Spam Arrest to be more
effective and easier to use than MailWasher, but they
do work in very different ways.
Just
as there is a wide variety in the names of the spam blockers,
there is also a variety in methods that they apply to
block Spam.
Our
favourite is without a doubt Spam Arrest because of the
simplisity and effectivness of it's email "authorisation"
system. It is also our preference as it stops the spam
before it even gets to your PC, so it saves your internet
connection from being tied up
MailWasher
is software that you have to install on your machine and
it can stop spam before it gets downloaded to your PC,
but it uses a combination of personal white lists, Global
Spammer lists and filtering technology to filter out spam,
instead of simply block it as Spam Arrest does, so we
found that we still ended up with some spam and we had
to spend more time tweaking it to get it to work better.
Having
said that, MailWasher beats the rest (apart from Spam
Arrest) hands down, in our opinion (and testing) due to
the simple logic of it's approach to blocking spam, instead
of trying to filter it.
You
will also notice that some of the spam "blockers"
above only work with certain email systems such as Outlook
and Outlook Express.
As
Spam Arrest is effectively a permission based system it
does not run on your local computer, so it will work for
whatever system you use, in other words it will work for
Mac users as well as PC users.
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