Should I Use A Free Spam Blocker?

By Rob Dee

With over 70 billion spams floating around the internet every day, and Symantec reporting that spam continues to be on the rise, it is now more important than ever to guard your email address against spam. The most effective method is he use of a spam blocker, a program designed specifically to filter spam out before it reaches your inbox.

Spam Blockers will usually work with a combination of blacklists, whitelists and bayesian(pronounced Bayes- i - an) filters. The Black List automatically classifies anything from a given email address(or domain) as Spam. The Whitelist automatically classifies anything from a given email address as NOT SPAM. The Bayesian Filter looks at everything left over after the blacklists and the whitelists have been applied and sorts it, based on what you historically label spam. This sort of technology is extremely efficient at filtering spam.

Spam Blockers, like most everything else on the Internet come in both paid and free versions, and the quality ranges from excellent to...well, let's just say I am aware of at least two free spam blockers which actually add to the problem. Spammers can be quite determined in thier efforts to get spam through. It is a common spammer tactic to put up a website with a 'remove from spam' list, which people innocently sign up thier email address to. They have of course just signed up to the spammers list and will be bombarded with spam. A more recent tactic goes a step further, offering free anti-spam software. In one case this software was merely ineffective and let all the spammers spam through, in another it actually infected the target machine with a program that let spam through, and used the targets machine as a zombie for sending spam from.

When dealing with the internet, due diligence is essential. If you want to use a free spam blocker, be sure that you do your research on it first. Just type it's name into google and see what people are saying. You should do this with paid spam blockers too, though they are less likely to be infected, the thought of paying someone to infect my computer disgusts me.

The one anti-spam product I have had a lot of success with, and would happily endorse, is the the one I advertise on my website - SpamWasher.

With an estimated 70-90 billion spam messages sent every day, the problem is not going away. Don't wait for someone to solve the problem for you, visit STOPSPAMNOW.info and download your free ebook on how to win the fight against spam.

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