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More computer tips
I've been searching for quite a while for tools I could use for reducing the amount of spam I had to wade through in my inbox. Sorting by hand was no longer enough, and setting up filters for keywords in my mail programs didn't work too well either. Here are my picks for good tools:
*************For POP3 mail (usually from your ISP)
*******The first program I tried was MailWatcher. I liked it in the beginning, but eventually stopped using it. But it still could be a good choice for you.
Why people choose Mailwatcher: 1) If you run unsafe mail programs like Outlook Express, it might be a good idea to check the headers or source code of messages before you download them 2) If you have limited hard drive space, you might want to delete the spam before it reaches you 3) You get less than 20 mails a day (including spam), and so the manual sorting doesn't take that much time.
Why I chose not to continue using Mailwatcher: 1) For my most spam prone e-mail address, it just took too long to sort the spam compared to just downloading it. 2) I tried the automated sorting feature (using publis blacklists, so called DNSBLs), but there are falses positives there, and I was too chicken to trust it when deleting right off the server.
*******So I ended up switching to SpamPal.
It's a system tray app that acts like a proxy between the mail server and your mail program, and adds a header and the phrase **SPAM** at the beginning of the subject line of mails it classifies as spam.
There are often false positives, meaning legitimate mail is classified as spam, but if you are careful, it's still worth using.
And by care, I mean this: Set your mail program up to filter to spamfolder1, then go through that folder manually every day and move spam to spamfolder2. I often find legitimate mail there, so keep that in mind. When you find legitimate mail there, add the e-mail address to your e-mail whitelist in SpamPal, and you won't get that problem again.
*****************For Webmail
Both Yahoo and Hotmail have spam folders. So do several other free webmail services. Hotmail and Yahoo work very differently. I don't know which one is best - I think I'd need someone else's expert opinion on that!
For those with their own domain names
If you have your own domain name, you often have the choice between POP3 accounts and forwards, sometimes also webmail accounts.
If you choose forwards, these can often be forwarded to several mail accounts at the same time. Maybe you forward to your ISP's POP3 account, and then download all the spam and sort with SpamPal. But you could also forward to a webmail account for use when you're travelling.
I'd recommend Yahoo in that case, because the spam filtering isn't broken even if you forward from another address. The added bonus is that Yahoo mail is readable by WAP (from mobile phones). Just remember to clean out the account one to several times a week if you do that - you still have the copy on your POP3 account, right, so you CAN just clean it out without worrying about it.
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