Sep 17th, 2009
Making spam go away
For those us who have been unable to transition our lives to Twitter and Facebook, we are highly dependent upon email. Unfortunately, the entire email system is overrun with unscrupulous types who blast out vast quantities of garbage, to the point that we must waste considerable time sifting through these pointless missives to get to the mails we care about.
For the past several years, Outlook has included a junk mail filter. This sounds promising but in reality it doesn’t do a very good job. The spammers have figured out how it filters the mail and game it with ease. What’s worse, it will also trap mails from clients and others I want in junk mail purgatory. This means that I have to look through all the putrid junk mail in case a mail I want got misfiled.
In my quest for a better alternative, I have landed on the service from Cloudmark. It installs a lightweight toolbar in Outlook and then taps the collective brains of its users to spot the spam. This means that it can’t get false positives, and it gets the vast majority of spam out there. I’ve been using it for about a week and in that time it caught an astonding 1,360 spam mails that Microsoft’s junk mail filter missed. Wow. What a lifesaver.
Here’s a tip for you. Cloudmark charges $39.95 per year per subscription for the service. Well worth it. But you can get it for less from Sunbelt Software under the brand name I Hate Spam for $29.95 or, and here’s the best part, $49.95 for a home site license.
If enough people start using this, maybe the percentage of people responding to spam (somebody must respond to spam or the spammers wouldn’t keep sending it) will go from .000001 of a percent to 0% and the spammers will all starve to death and leave us alone. One can hope.
The sad thing about all this spam is what it’s done to legit emails from strangers, such as the high school student who wrote me today asking to shadow me on as I work. Humm, not sure how exciting watching me in the home office is with the 3 dogs flaked out around me… but anyhow, I almost didn’t respond beause the fear of spam. That’s sad.
I almost didn�t respond beause the fear of spam. That�s sad.