I don’t know how much spam you receive but I receive a lot. If I had to guess you receive just as much if not more and if not consider yourself really lucky :-)
Even though I receive a lot of spam I consider myself lucky enough to use SpamBayes. Just in case you have never heard about SpamBayes, it is a statistical anti spam filter written in Python. Basically it just splits each message into its distinct words, assigns a spam probability to each word and calculates the total spam probability for the whole message. Messages are divided into three categories, Ham (=good mail), Spam and Unsure. All this calculation is done based on the training you did so in that respect it is an artificial intelligence solution, you train it and it gets smarter at working for you :-) Training doesn’t take much effort, specially if you have a folder with a few hundred known spam messages and it makes very few mistakes once trained. Any time it misplaces a message all you need to do is to click the “Delete as Spam” or “Recover from Spam” buttons and it immediately moves the message and updates its keyword database to avoid the mistake in the future.
But the best thing about SpamBayes is that it’s completely free and integrates well with Microsoft Outlook 2003. You can find the project at SourceForge at
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net.
Recommended!
Maurice de Beijer
www.TheProblemSolver.nl