Spam presents a huge and growing problem without a simple, one-size-fits-all solution. Situations vary from user to user. Many of us lawyers are (overly?) concerned about losing a single Email due to a Spam blocker that declares a good Email to be bad. Could the one Email we miss be that out-of-the-blue Big Client we are waiting for?

Expert users have strong, conflicting opinions about "the best" antispam solutions. Some swear by smart software; others swear at it.

Let's consider several kinds of cures, then look briefly at prevention.

TM Spam Rule: "Is in TM Database"

Spam Rules in Time Matters offer an excellent feature: You can create a rule that marks any Email from a Sender who has an Email address in your Time Matters as Not Spam. With this rule in effect and no other spam software between you and your clients and important contacts, you would never lose an Email from them.

But that rule won't help you with an Email from a new prospect who needs your help. Make them more noticeable in a sea of spam, you need to employ Time Matter's other rules that can smoke out Senders whose Email addresses are mostly number or don't end in .com, .net, .org, etc. You can apply ever higher Spam Levels based on these criteria. They are not perfect but they can speed up your review of large volumes of Email. Do you really need to pay attention to Email from the Czech Republic that has numbers in the Sender's Email address? The answer is Yes for some lawyers (are you reading this Mike T?) but not for most.

Spam Blacklist Servers and Collaboratives

For those, like me, who are sensitive about false positives and receive hundreds of Emails per day, Spam blacklist servers can be a big help. These databases keep blacklists of servers that repeatedly send out spam. SpamCop and ORDB are two examples. I have never seen a good Email that was blacklisted by these servers. These servers are not perfect as some innocent companies have discovered, but they are very, very convenient.

Collaboratives connect users of specific antispam software to a common database. When one or a specified number of users marks an Email as spam, the software updates the database so that Email will be marked as spam when received by others in the collaborative.

Heuristics

Software can employ heuristics or "learning" to differentiate between Email that looks suspicious and Email that looks friendly. This software can "learn" the differences as you mark some Emails as good and others as bad. Because each user's Email preferences differ from others, the software customizes itself for each user.

My Antispam Software: MailWasher Pro with First Alert

I have been using MailWasher for a couple of years. I upgraded from the free version to Pro version for $37 and pay $7 per year for First Alert, the collaborative service. The free version was catching about 75% of the spam I received with zero false positives. Now only about 3 messages per day sneak through the 4 levels of defense. Blacklist servers catch by far the most, but the collaborative and heuristics mop up the other 25% or so.

An advantage and disadvantage of MailWasher Pro is that it runs as a separate program. That means that you can use it side-by-side with Time Matters and other Email programs, and even with Webmail programs that support POP3. It also means that you have a separate program to look at. I find that to be an advantage. I can glance at new Emails periodically (just at the ones that are colored green, meaning not spam), dash off a quick reply from within MailWasher if an Email does not need to be filed in Time Matters, and then periodically retrieve my spam-free Email into Time Matters.

My company and I have no financial interest in MailWasher; it is a product I like and use. www.mailwasher.net or www.firetrust.com

Prevention

Long articles have been written on how to avoid getting your Email address(es) on spammer lists in the first place. Though it is possible that your Email address got on a list because you bought online, it is much more likely that your Email address was "harvested" from your website, a public Q and A forum, or a subscription to a free service, such as Joke of the Day.

For a simple but pretty effective form of protection, you can encode the Email addresses on your website. Go to this webpage to generate the encoded addresses:
Email Encoder
The great thing about this approach is that your Email address appears normally on your webpage and can even be copied and pasted by visitors, but it is obscured in the actual code of your webpage (the HTML). That obscurity fools the address harvesters, but not your human visitors.

Switching Email addresses is an effective form of prevention but has obvious downsides: 1) It is inconveneint for your clients and friends. 2) Good people and bad will still send to the old address, so you will have two Email sources to check. If you do go to all the trouble of switching, be sure to read a good article on preventing spam. You will want to protect your new address(es). The following article is dated, but good: CNET Spam-Off

We certainly have not exhausted the subject in this lengthy post. A variety of solutions not discussed here are available, such as server-based software and monthly services. Creative, unheralded weapons are bound to appear as the fight against spam continues.

For more, see: Fighting Spam - Part 2

Keywords: key_Communication