Don't let spammers take over your email

By DON McALLISTER

It doesn't matter what you call it - unsolicited commercial email, junkmail or spam - it's still a pain.

Last week we talked to Captain Bob, one of those who make money from sending out junk mail by the million. This week we look at five spam-fighting tools in the war against Captain Bob and his ilk.

Spam Arrest

Spam Arrest intercepts email at its server and checks to make sure senders are approved to send you email. If they are you get the mail. If not they're blocked.

Senders need to verify themselves only once - by responding to a Spam Arrest email asking them to click on a link and enter a word into a form. It's possible spammers might verify themselves, but as most spam is sent by automated programs, which can't complete authorisation, it's highly unlikely.

Users can also verify or block whoever they want, and since you choose who to block, there's no chance of accidentally stopping intended email.

Spam Arrest is labour-intensive at the start but the work quickly reduces. In my case, verifying five days of stored e-mail took two hours.

But it was by far the most effective spam-blocking tool. Once you set it up you simply need to check the unverified senders list daily (it is held for seven days).

While it works on Eudora, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape, Incredimail, and any other email program that supports the pop3 protocol, it won't work if you're an Xtra user.

Xtra blocks pop3 email accounts from networks other than Telecom's, so it blocks your email going via the Spam Arrest server. That means its 400,000 customers can't choose this service for dealing with spam. The only other downside is the price - US$34.95 ($63.70) a year. But a free 30-day demo lets you see how good this service is.

i-Spy

Like Spam Arrest, ihug's junk-mail filtering service is not based on the user's computer, but runs from ihug's servers. It scans emails against more than 400 rules, which look for spam keywords and phrases, and refer to spammer blacklists. The more rules an email breaks, the higher its score and the greater the chance it will be blocked.

Users can set their filter to basic, intermediate, advanced or assassin levels. I set mine to assassin which stopped a large amount of junk. Filtered mail is banished to 21-day quarantine folder, which you can access through a webpage.

That's just as well because i-Spy doesn't get everything right: retrieving the 16 per cent of false positives did get a little annoying. But overall, the service was efficient and, at $2.50 a month, good value. A shame it's only available to ihug users.

iHateSpam

Once this program, which integrates with Outlook and Outlook Express, is installed, it analyses incoming email against its spam indicators.

In the Outlook version that I used, it then places suspicious emails in a quarantine folder. The program can be set up to issue an alert when spam is intercepted or work in the background.

Installation took only a few minutes, eliminating half of the day's spam and wrongly quarantining one, a ratio that improved after a few days of adding "Friends" and "Enemies". I easily rectified any false positives in the quarantine folder.

Maintenance is a breeze and overall it's another great - but not perfect - spam-fighting tool. Reasonably priced at US$19.95 ($36.35).

SpamNet

Cloudmark's SpamNet is a worldwide spam-fighting community that shares your spam-busting decisions with a central list. When you submit a spam message to SpamNet, it generates a secure fingerprint or signature of each message, which it then shares with all users to identify the same spam message in their email.

If spam is found, SpamNet moves it to the "Spam box" where you can verify whether it really is spam. This software has the drawback of calling home for each email across the internet for a "yes or no" to the spam list - which slows mail collection by several seconds an email.

The simple three-button interface is easy to use, but works only with Outlook and Outlook Express.

My testing showed showed good results - 83 per cent blocked - and it's free.

MailWasher

This New Zealand-made program goes to the mail server, just as your email program does, but retrieves only the header information and the first few lines of each message.

From there, you mark messages you recognise as spam, or agree with MailWasher's suspicion that they're spam. You select whether to delete or bounce messages, then click "Process Mail".

After you've used MailWasher for a while - adding contacts to a friends list and the junk to a spam list - MailWasher learns what is and isn't spam and blocks most spam (in my case 81 per cent) automatically.

I found having to run MailWasher before each email collection a bit annoying. But removing offending emails at the server means you don't waste bandwidth.