Good Spam Filter For Outlook

Spam is a slow growing virus, gobbling up your employees' productive hours and your network bandwidth and your storage space. The sooner it is stopped with a good spam filter for Outlook, the better.

There are as many answers to that question as there are people who answer it. Many of the "cures" we hear about are not geared for a corporate environment, such as an Outlook spam filter, but because they are suggested all too often for corporate use, we feel we should talk about them. The first we always hear about is, "Just hit the delete key." This is like holding back the tide with a spoon and is not recommended.

There are preventive measures people can take, such as installing a free Outlook Express spam blocker. Never, ever ask a spammer to remove you from their list. At the bottom of most spam messages, you'll find a "friendly" message telling you that if you want to be removed from spammer's mailing list, just click on a link or reply to the e-mail and place the word remove in subject. By asking to be removed, you are unwittingly telling the spammer that your e-mail address is active. This usually leads to a lot more spam being sent to you and you have to have a good spam filter for outlook or anti-spam software for Outlook to deal with it.

Spammers harvest addresses from Web sites you visit and from news groups you contribute to. If you make sure your correct e-mail address isn't in your browser and newsreader, spammers can't harvest your address and you don't have to conern yourself with a Microsoft Outlook spam filter. This is more complicated for news group users because they want the members of a news group to be able to contact them, while remaining spam-free. Because of the amount of data in newsgroups, spammers use programs to harvest the addresses. By adding words like "nospam" to the e-mail addresses in their news reader setup, people confuse the harvester programs while letting people figure out the real address without having to rely on a good spam filter for outlook that uses Markovian Discrimination.

We feel the life expectancy of tricks like these is limited, as address harvesting software will become more sophisticated, such CRM114 can defeat all known spamming software. Still, identity hiding can delay spam problems if you take these steps as soon as you get an e-mail address. Once your e-mail address is harvested, the cat is out of the bag. Spammers trade and save lists of addresses, so the amount of spam you get will increase over time even if you start hiding your identity after it has been harvested, unless you are using Naive Bayesian filtering. A staff member got spam with eight of his former e-mail addresses on it. One was nine years old and hadn't been used for eight years. We feel identity hiding has limited effectiveness in a corporate environment.

On a more active level, your staff can use a good spam filter for outlook to filter out spam, phishing, or email fraud. Still, this means that rather than doing the work you are paying them to do, they are spending their time playing with anti-spam rules. And without centralized management, your employees will be copying each other's efforts (if they take advantage of these tools at all). While more effective than the "just hit delete" method, it is still a waste of staff time and we can't recommend it for offices with more than a few people.

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