Spam has become even a larger problem over the past year (especially since about October 2006) than ever before.
For us as a hosting company, it came to the point of spending approximately 2-3 hours a day just dealing with and customizing spam filters to help keep it down for our customers. This of course keeps us from doing the important work (programming, design and building a better mousetrap) that keeps our business running and our customers happy.
A large part of the spam issue is that the highest amount of spam is coming through as images created by the spammers - with no links and no words, so the filters were useless - just what the spammers want. That coupled with a nonsensical writing tool that throws unrelated words together to form some sort of a random story with each email. The worse onslaught came with Russian SpamThru - a peer-to-peer agent that uses the computers of unsuspecting people to throw out the spam, making it impossible to block and trace. There is only so much a host can do before it becomes so costly and time wasting that they throw up their hands and give up - and the spammers of course know this - that's why they develop these methods and tools.
In our case, that in turn began stressing out the server and keeping it from doing the job it is supposed to do with some of our programming, so we have implemented a new program that doe not stress out server resources and labels according to certain algorithms a spam factor - You will be able to detect this in your incoming mail. We suggest you set up a folder specifically for this and filter all your messages to there because nothing is perfect and it is possible for something to be detected as spam that is not. I have been personally testing it for two weeks now, and I get more mail than the average person - and out of 20,000 emails in two weeks labeled as spam - only 2 were not.
Now, you might ask - (as you noticed the number of emails I said I get), "How do you deal with this on your own account without losing your sanity!?"
For 5 years, I have used MailWasher - Mailwasher is probably the best tool I've ever purchased because of the amount of email I have to deal with in a day and the number of accounts I have to manage. It is a wonderful tool because I can run all of my accounts through Mailwasher BEFORE I download my email. It enables me to delete spam and garbage right from the server - it never even TOUCHES my computer. It has filters, blacklists, whitelists and extremely simple instructions. There is a 30 day free trial - and there is actually a free version that never expires. I personally used mine for 3 days before I shelled out the nominal amount to own it. There are not upgrade fees and the pro version is ONLY $37 (I would have paid more). The software comes with easy to follow instructions and great support as well. The pro version also supports being able to check AOL, MSN and Hotmail too! Click here to download the free trial - you have nothing to lose - but a load of spam!
I would highly suggest you get this - it will save you time and aggravation, and truly help manage your important email. If you get 100 a day or 10,000 a day like me - it will save your sanity!
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