More than 200 spams are sent to me DAILY. Yes, I’m not exaggerating.
Luckily, a bunch of ’em are stopped before they hit my inbox due to Brightmail filtering offered by my ISP (Earthlink) for free.
But that still leaves tons of spam hitting my inbox.
I was using a program called POPfile, which had an admirable 97-98% effectiveness with sorting my e-mail. Unfortunately, some of that 2-3% was painful, since I couldn’t ‘whitelist’ e-mail from my friends. In other words, there was no way to tell the software to automatically accept (and not mark as spam) e-mail from people in my Outlook addressbook.
So I ditched POPfile and I’ve been trying the embarrassingly aol’ishly named “ihatespam” program.
It’s $20, though free after rebate with amazon.com when you buy any version of Turbotax.
Here’s my take on the software so far:
POSITIVES:
– Easy install
– Is free after rebate when you buy it with any TurboTax product from Amazon.com (kindly do so via http://amazon.smilezone.com — thanks!)
– Integrates tightly with Outlook… no need to reconfigure POP stuff with proxy servers, etc.
– Offers “bounce” feature, whereby you can send a fake but convincing ‘bounce’ mail from your domain’s Postmaster, hopefully fooling some spammers into thinking your e-mail address is no longer valid.
– Can whitelist addresses from contact folders and e-mail folders.
– Strong support (I got a response just a couple of hours after e-mailing them).
– Decently configurable
– Free 30-day trial
– Can easily create own rules using functionality much more powerful than Outlook’s native rules wizard
NEGATIVES:
– Only works with Outlook and Outlook Express (and not even so well on the latter, apparently)
– Costs money ($20) if you don’t get it with TurboTax
– Some usability issues (too many clicks required for some tasks)
– Occasionally removed focus from e-mails I’m typing when it is handling incoming mails.
– Can’t see hard-coded rules ‘under the hood’
– Yearly ‘rules’ updates cost $15
The program has incorrectly flagged some of my e-mail newsletters, but — given the whitelist functionality — has not and apparently will not ever mark mail from my friends as spam, and that’s very important to me.
Hope this is helpful to those of you who are also deluged by spam.
What do you think?