Cast Away The Spam Demons
May 4, 2008 – 5:55 am
Its been 30 years since Gary Thuerk sent the first spam e-mail promoting a new product from his company Digital Equipment. The message was sent over the Arpanet, a government-run network that later became the Internet, and the reaction from the other users was fiercely negative. However, Thuerk’s spam did generate some sales. Today, by some accounts, nearly 90% of all email that travels across the net is spam.
So what can you do? Some IPS’s (internet service providers) attempt to filter out spam messages for you but one solution is to install a spam filter on your computer. If you are using a Windows computer try one of these great spam filters SpamBayes, Spamato or MailWasher. Mac users should check out Spam Sieve, Spam Sweep or POPfile. Please don’t take any of these recommendations as an endorsement since I don’t use any of them. However, they are all free and any reduction in spam is better than nothing.
I use the lazy man’s spam filter – Google. I simply opened a free Google mail account and I use it for anything that I think may generate unwanted spam e-mail like when I sign up for a free service on the internet. G-mail allows you to forward your e-mail so I set up the account to automatically forward to my actual e-mail address. Using this technique has virtually eliminated spam from my inbox. The really great thing about using this method is I don’t have to install or upgrade the filtering software. Google handles it for me and they are much better at it than I would ever be.
Give this method a try and over time I guarantee you will see a reduction in amount of spam that is cluttering your inbox.