Anti-Spam: Managing Unwanted E-Mails
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E-mail is now being abused. The flow of spam on the Internet is the proof. It is annoying to download
hundreds of disgusting spam emails into the inbox looking for some legitimate messages. Not only you
waste your valuable time to delete junk emails by hand, you also waste your money as each spam message
in your inbox takes precious kilobytes of bandwidth you paid for. In addition, spam messages can contain
viruses, which can infect your computer system, and hidden tracking codes, which work as soon as you click
on the message and let the spammer know that your email address is valid. With all that said, it would be
great to delete the messages that you don’t want to receive beforehand and launch your email client to pull
down only good emails. Anti-spam software can do this for you. It helps you fight against annoying spam.
There is a wide choice of anti-spam filters available on the Internet. The common services or features they
offer are:
• Whitelist and Blacklist. The decision whether an email message is spam or good is taken based on the
sender’s email address. The whitelist contains “friendly” email addresses, and the blacklist contains
potential spammers, or simply people you don’t want to communicate with.
• Filtering based on the message subject or content. Some words or phrases are met in spam emails more
often than others. These are usually vulgar or adult words (sometimes too offending). Thus, filtering based
on a keyword is rather helpful.
• Virus scanning. There is possibility that spam email contains a virus in the attachment. Certain anti-spam
programs allow you block emails with various suspicious attachments.
• Automatic spam detection. Some anti-spam filters can check inbound email and delete the emails they
consider as spam automatically at a regular basis.
• Email recovering. Some spam blockers provide you with the ability to move spam emails to a quarantine
folder and keep them for a fixed number of days. In addition, there is the possibility to recover an email from
the trash if you need it.
So, with the great features and benefits that antispam software offers, you can now easily block the majority
of spam emails.
The ideal anti-spam software is the one that ensures you your privacy and blocks 100 percent of the emails
you do not want to receive. But it is never going to be possible. Spammers are always inventing new
techniques to trick the filters, and the developers of anti-spam software try not to overlook it.
Most anti-spam programs can be customized to your needs, and only the approved emails come into your
inbox. Let’s look at the features and benefits of anti-spam software.
Deleting spam before it reaches the inbox. Certain anti-spam solutions take the decision about spam
messages not only based on the sender’s email address, they also analyze the subject lines and the
message content. Some anti-spam programs allow you block emails with various types of attachments. Most
anti-spam solutions catch and delete detected spam emails before they slip into your inbox.
Filter updates. Most programs for filtering spam come with hundreds of filters built in. In addition, the
developers of those programs release new anti-spam filters regularly. This ensures that your anti-spam
software is always up-to-date.
Custom filters. Certain anti-spam filters allow you tailor built in filters to your personal needs as well as
create your own filters, depending on the spam and legitimate emails you receive.
Quarantining spam. Spam blockers prevent junk emails from entering your inbox and move them to a
specific quarantine or trash folder. Quarantined emails are stored there for a number of days and then
deleted forever. This delay allows you review deleted emails to check if all of them are spam.
Recovering emails. Certain anti-spam filters store quarantined emails for a fixed number of days in the
specific trash folder and allow you to recover any email.
Your personal whitelist and blacklist. You can maintain your own lists of trusted email senders (whitelist) and
suspicious email addresses, from which you are used to receive spam (blacklist). You can always update
your whitelist and blacklist as you want.
Monitoring multiple email accounts. This feature allows you monitor and filter your email from multiple email
accounts. You to filter your home email from the office, and vice versa.
Automatic mode. Certain anti-spam programs can check inbound mail at fixed time intervals and delete
spam without your participation.
