No matter how hard you try it is difficult to stop all spam. Even if you keep your email address safe, by not posting it on the web or in newsgroups, it can still be harvested by trojans from the machine of someone you correspond with, if they get infected. It is therefore worthwhile having a means of dealing with any spam that does get through.

An effective solution can be to use an email address from a filtering service. These can be redirected using an existing mail account or provide a seperate new account. If you are going to use an email address on a web page these are much better than throw away accounts, as you want something that can remain there permanently.

Rather than have a new email account you can get software that runs on your own PC in conjunction with your email client and existing account(s). Spam recognition can be done in several ways, looking for tell tale spam signs in the email, matching against blacklists, or using statistical analysis on the word content (Bayesian filtering). Local software can run as an extension (plugin) to your mail client, a POPbox pre-processor, a proxy server or a command line process. POPbox pre-processors can allow you to delete mail from the POP server to save downloading it. Proxy servers allow you to use your mail client as normal except that it gets mail from the proxy server which in turn gets it from the POP server, parses it for spam and then passes it back. Although some products work with other solutions, most work with POP boxes which are popular. Most email clients can do some string matching and filtering without the need for any extra software.

There is a bewildering choice of anti-spam products and I will only mention a few. You may find more at Spamotomy's site.

What ever product you use make sure that it does not bounce mail back to the spammer. It is a long while since spammers had their email address in the From field. Some of the commercial bulk mail mailers following the "Can Spam" act may do it, but most spammers just use the act as justification for how they can spam you, while they completely ignore the act's requirements. If you bounce a spam to the From address it will more than likely go to an innocent third party who may well be swamped with such rubbish. You are not doing anything clever or useful, despite what the software suppliers such as Mailwasher claim. You are just adding to the problem.

Spam filtering solutions