Spam !
What to do about all those offers to enhance parts of your anatomy and the like...............
First of all make sure you are using the spam filtering services that your ISP or email provider makes available. BT Internet, Orange, Tiscali and others have spam or junk filtering systems but don't necessarily turn them on by default. At their simplest they will mark spam with [**** SPAM ****] or something similar in the subject line which allows you to set up a filtering rule to bin it. Turning things up a notch and spam will be held in a folder that you can access via webmail to check for "false positives" ie good messages wrongly identified as spam,
To minimise the risk of false positives you may need to add correspondents to your address book on the ISPs email system, or add them to a "whitelist" so that the filter doesn't catch them.
If you download email to read on your computer using an email program like Thunderbird, Outlook, Outlook Express etc you have some further options.
Thunderbird has a spam filter built in and you can tell it about messages it misses or gets wrong so it can learn from its mistakes. Pegasus is another free emailer program with inbuilt spam filtering.
Outlook2003 has some mail filtering rules and a similar feature is built into Vista's Windows Mail..
Outlook Express has no useful anti-spam functions but there are plenty of 3rd party add-ons. There are tutorials on the web showing how to use the filtering rules.
Some internet security suites include spam filters alongside their virus scanning of incoming email.
If you need to add spam filtering to a computer running Outlook we suggest one of the free "Bayesian" filters that use statistics based on a collection of yourgood email and spam :-
Spambayes for Outlook 2000 / 2002(XP) / 2003
Matador for Outlook 2003 only, has a better user interface thanSpambayes. Download here.
For Outlook Express my usual recommendation is to upgrade to Thunderbirdand be done with it. So much more robust and includes spam filtering.If you want to stick with Outlook Express you could try the Spamaware plugin, Spamfighter or SpamTerrier. These plugins may also support Outlook and/or Windows Mail, check the links for the current situation.
A slightly different approach is to attack the spam on the server, and then download the clean email as normal. Mailwasher is a good example of this approach.
Yet another approach is to run a program that collects email from your ISP, thenyou collect from the program. K9is one such spam filtering proxy, Spampal and Popfile are others. The advantage is you can use any email program with it, the disadvantage is the slightly more complex setup.
Some ISPs like Orange and Demon allow you to use multiple email addresses of the form anything@hostname.isp.co.uk - this can be useful but equally it provides spammers with an option to guess at what comes in front of the @ symbol. If you only use one address like phil@..... then set your email program up to collect email only to phil@...... by putting phil+hostname or the full email address into the account settings -rather than just putting the hostname in.
If you want an email account that comes pre-filtered then check out Spamcop which offers a versatile service at a modest fee.
Another approach is to use a service like eXpurgate to give you an email address and then have that service forward the filtered mail to your ISP account.
Finally it is worth considering how you got the spam in the first place.Don't put your email address in plain text on web sites or the like - use something like phil <at> yarwell<dot>demon.co.uk to put off the robot harvesters.
If your address is on a website for contacts don't put it in a plain mailto: link or a simple form but use one of the encryption methods to conceal it behind a clickable link. An alternative is the "Recaptcha" tool which helps digitise old books as a byproduct of stopping robots spamming your email address. If you want people to be able to read your email address on a web page then make an image file of your address in 10 or 12 point text using Windows Paint and stick that on the web page rather than actual text - humans can read it but spam robots can't.For an example of the Recaptcha method click here to send me an email.
Or click on the image of my email address : 