[polarbear]

Anyone have any recommended freeware programs to eliminate spam?

[Sore Feet]

Delete Key Ver.1.0

[MCaver]

If you use Microsoft Outlook as your email software, I highly recommend SpamNet from Cloudmark. I've been using it for quite a while and it's about 85% effective, without a single false positive so far. I get an amazing amount of spam (~2000/wk) and SpamNet is the only reason email is even viable for me now. They are working on a version for Outlook Express. SpamNet

[Newt]

MCaver...is that 2000 from your personal email or is it website related? I don't even get that much with hotmail. and I thought 10 a day way bad. NN

[Alan Bauer]

I'll get on average 150/day. It is solely from buying things on the internet and then having those email address sold/distributed. I'm sure some internet sites can garnish the info when you simply visit the sites but I don't worry about that and it can't be that really since ALL my spam goes to one email address. That address I set up to use solely as my address to use when ordering things, and I have never received a spam to my attbi.com account since it is never used except for email...same goes with my business email with alanbauer.com. I will get some there....1-2 a month...from web crawlers who find the site and pick the email address to send an add to. I simply filter that email address off the side to a different folder and it makes my inbox clear and simple. I am looking for what MCaver mentioned however now as I'm starting to get more and more stuff that can't easily be filtered away like I'm currently doing. And...I really don't want a university diploma nor larger breasts at this time, so I don't need to see the stuff!

[MCaver]

The 2000 spams I get each week are a result of several things -- having the same email address for many years, having domain names that publicly display your email address, buying things online, etc. Spammers will get your email address any way they can, and once one of them has it, they sell it to others. I reinstalled SpamNet a few months ago and it has blocked over 20,000 spams since then, and only 700 have made it though so I had to delete them myself. And with SpamNet, if you block one that gets through, it sends it to the master server so others will have it blocked as well. That's how the whole thing works. It only considers something as spam when someone has blocked it, but since there are over 400k users of the software there's a good chance someone will have blocked it before you. It uses mass spamming against the spammers -- the more people they send it to, the more likely someone is to blocking then no one else with SpamNet will see it. It uses a unique encrypted string to send to the server so it never sends your actual email.