Spam Email

If you use email a lot you will have likely noticed that despite ever more laws and regulations spam email has increased, rather than decreased.  In fact it's estimated that over 80% of email traffic on the Internet is unsolicited commercial email.  I'm asked a lot for ways to stop spam, and to be honest your options are fairly limited, as follows.

Firstly you can use an anti-virus or security product with anti-spam built in.  This can help stop spam hitting your inbox, but you are still downloading it and it's usually just filtered into a spam folder in your email program. For low levels of spam this may be all you need. 

To stop mail from actually arriving on your PC you typically have a couple of options.  One is using a program like Mailwasher, which looks at your mailbox at your Internet provider and removes the spam before you download the entire message.  The other is turning on spam filtering at your ISP or email host, so they remove it before you even see it.  This is very effective but can result in you not seeing email falsely detected as spam.

Finally, using a webmail service like Gmail is also very effective as Googles spam filtering is brilliant. You can even use your own email address with Gmail and have all your mail forwarded to a gmail account purely to take advantage of its spam and virus filtering.  Ask me how if you think this might be useful for you!