How To Choose Anti-Spam Filter?

The damage spam brings you is huge: loss of time, bandwidth and money, risk to delete a legitimate message together with junk emails. So, an anti-spam filter is not a whim but a necessity for almost all PC users who actively use email. What criteria should you follow to choose the right spam filtering program? What capabilities must an anti-spam tool have to filter and cut off spam mail in most effective way? Here are the main features a good anti-spam software must have to block spam effectively: 1) it should be a standalone spam filtering tool, which checks all incoming emails on the server, detects and deletes spam messages. 2) deletion of spam without receiving it in your inbox. This way you won't download all the superfluous kilobytes into your inbox and you won't see annoying spam mail. 3) powerful antispam filters built in one program that analyze the message from "outside" and "inside": message header, message body, and message source. Flexible whitelist and blacklist easy to edit and update are also very useful as they help save much time when filtering emails. Good anti-spam software must also have the Bayesian filter in its arsenal of spam filtering tools. 4) easy and safe method to preview emails marked as spam. Inherent in antispam technology is the fact that there will be false positives and false negatives, i.e., email can be flagged as spam even though it is not actually spam and vice versa. 5) flexible spam filtering. Spam emails should be moved to a separate folder. A good spam filtering software should provide the ability to recover an email if it was accidentally marked as spam and trashed. Simply put, an anti-spam program must be a standalone, easy-to-use software supplied with powerful anti-spam filters able to be adjusted by every user for his personal needs. Now with all that said above you can choose the right anti-spam software among all spam filtering programs available on the Internet.

What Is Anti-spam Filter?

Spam is unsolicited and unwanted email. Other common names of spam are spam mail, bulk email or just junk mail. Today, spam has reached such monumental proportions that almost every other message we receive is spam. Protecting the inbox with anti-spam filter has become one of the barest necessities for almost all PC users.

In a few words, anti-spam software helps detect spam. It is a program that detects unsolicited and unwanted e-mails, and doesn’t let them slipping into your inbox. The anti-spam program is installed onto your computer and filters your inbound emails. The email filtering is carried out based on a number of criteria. These can be specific words in the subject line or in the body of the message, type of files attached to the message, images embedded into the message. You could set the filter to check the sender’s email address out. If you have your own whitelist or address book with trusted email addresses, you could arrange the anti-spam filter to refer to that whitelist. It also can detect known spammers by checking a blacklist of habitual spam senders maintained by certain Internet Service Providers. If the email sender is on the blacklist, the message is rejected.

Anti-spam filters have adapted to the wiles of the spammers. They use techniques that do not trash legitimate emails by effectively analyzing the content of the email. Such software looks for keywords and tries to interpret their meanings in the sentences. Certain spam filters reject the messages if they come to you in the form of "Undisclosed Recipients", and accept the emails where your email address is in the “To” or “Cc” fields.

Anti-spam filter is an essential part of your computer’s security tools if you want to ensure that you only receive the emails you want. Now you can select the right anti-spam software for your computer and start fighting spam.