It looks like I need a spam filter worthy of its name. Lately my e-mail account has been inundated with commercial advertising, most of which looks pretty legitimate; in other words, it does not appear to carry a nasty payload. That said, it is a royal PIA to weed thru it manually. While I intend to shift to T-bird for e-mail one of these days, for now I'm using Outlook. I have no interest in changing my addy, there are too many folks that know and use the one I have used for years. I am running a number of anti virus software, and whatever else, the filter needs to peacefully coexist with them and not gobble up too much processor and short term memory. Currently running AVG, AdAware, Malwarebytes, Spybot, SpywareBeGone, Spyware Terminator, and the usual crud from M$. A pretty porky setup, and with weekly scans (daily AVG and Spyware Terminator), about all they catch is a tracking cookie and once in a long while a trojan. (There is a conflict somewhere in that mess, it freezes the process for a very short while several times a day, on or off line. I'll find that somehow and somewhen.) Side notes and observations: -My ISP has a blacklisting feature, but as you are aware, adding things to that usually does little since spammers change addresses faster than a call girl changes her skivvies. Same problem with Outlook's lists (which I don't bother trying to use.) -spam@uce.gov seems to be doing nothing about "legitimate" ads. Seems OK to me, since they really don't want to interfere with commerce, just bag things like child porn that are against the law. "UCE" is a smoke screen for finding illegal stuff, not a service to rid the web of ads. -I have only Norman AV on the laptop, I don't use Outlook on it; just go to webmail when away from the house machine. Seems to work pretty well. Cruising the web gives me a headache with all the good reviews posted by those that have an axe to grind. I need input from users that are happy or unhappy with the anti-spam software they are using. FWIW, I had a peek at spambully.com. It has features I like, but couldn't find it listed or reviewed independently. It seems to be able to learn, and it can bounce as well as reports. (Reports to uce.gov, but that appears useless as noted.) So what recommendations can you make about spam filters? HELP!!
I use System Mechanic 7 Pro and have had very good luck with it for spam-blocking, anti-virus, firewall, and general system optimizing. Just make sure if you run it, that you set the parameters for automatic system optimization or it will wait until you really need your system and be right in the middle of a complete clean-up.
Very few problems with spam; my ISP does a good job filtering. For personal use take a look at the free programs at http://www.nonags.com/nonags/emas.html
I use a yahoo account for a lot of my email, but the spammers find it and overload the inbox or spam box. It allows that you can refuse all email that yahoo marks as spam. The problem is, it is not fool proof. With my internet service provider I also have two accounts. My wife uses the primary one and sometimes spam does get through. The account I use doesn't get any spam, yet! The account my wife uses has gotten a few, not many, spam emails that the service didn't block. Talk to your service providers, see if there is anything they can do. BTW, I'm using Thunderbird on all of my computers. Even on my wife's computer, which has Windows Vista, I set it up in Thunderbird for her. My desktop and laptop are both running Linux, but any amount of AV or spyware will not stop spam email. There may be some Windows based programs that will do it, OTT, I hope you find a solution.
