I’ve been helping out some friends who run a small office by providing some computer and networking support. They have a mixture of PCs and Macs and get their email from a POP3 server at their ISP. The PCs are mostly using Outlook Express and I’m not sure what the Macs are using but it’s most likely the Mac equivalent of OE. They get a ton of spam on a daily basis, and their ISP isn’t likely to install any spam blockers at the server level any time soon. So, what spam blocker(s) would you recommend to be installed at the client level to help alleviate the flood of incoming spam? Preferably one that will work on both the PCs and Macs and won’t break the bank to buy/license. And, if you have any horror stories about spam blockers to avoid, I’d be interested in hearing about those as well.
Well, spampal is free and is what I use. It slows down email retrieval a bit, but the time I lose with that is gained back by not having to sift through all that spam. I’ve found it snags about 90% of the spam I get. It works with any mail client, so long as that client can filter messages via mail rules.
It does have its downsides, but I’ve found it pretty good for the price.
I’m sure someone else will be along with something better, though.
Probably not the answer you’re looking for if you want to stick with OE, but mozilla has a very good spamblocker integrated into it’s mail client. I get a lot of spam, and after a day or two of training the spam filter seems to have around a 99% success rate with almost no false positives.
I use Mailwasher. I started with the free version but upgraded later to the professional version. The pro version is trainable and it can detect most of the spam that gets past the ISP’s filters. You can also bounce spams back to the source and make the idiots sending spam out think your address is not valid. The pro version also tracks and generates reports on how much spam you receive and how much of it you delete/bounce. It also allows you to maintain a friends list so it will know which emails are legit. It has additional options for reporting spam to organizations like Spam Cop, but I haven’t used these yet.
I use Popfile and have been very happy with it. It’s open source, and currently I’m getting about 99.6% accuracy rate on it. I think my accuracy is slightly high as I get a lot of mailing list traffic, but most people get accuracy in the 90%+ range.
Which version, and is it an additional download? Wy wife is using Mozilla, and if it is good, and Bayesian, this will be great. I use Mozilla also, but don’t use ISP mail at home. Yahoo spam blocking is about 99% effective, and seems to be getting better all the time.
