Just wanted to let everyone know I’m back from vacation and am available once again for support and new project inquiries.

After taking the last five days off from work, I was welcomed this morning with about 2,500 spam emails in Outlook. Keep in mind I check about 8 other domain email accounts aside from the Veda Designs mail - so this is a pretty normal build-up for five days of being offline.

Spam, my darlings, is an unfortunate but mostly unavoidable consequence of posting your email address on the web. There are methods to help prevent it (such as encrypting your email address on your website or using a graphic in lieu of an email link), but even if you guard your email by savvy publishing on your website, spam bots can harvest it from any other website you’ve posted your email to.

The good news is that there are some pretty nifty tools out there which will at least allow you to filter the good from bad mail if you use an email client like Outlook to download your mail. I personally use SpamBayes, which…IMHO…is one of the very best open source (free) spam filter tools for Outlook. It does require a bit of initial training which allows you to teach it good mail from bad, but once you’ve done this - I’d say it catches about 95% or more of the bad mail.

Unfortunately, it occasionally flags good mail as bad (false-positives). Usually this is from addresses that have numbers or dashes in the email address and come from free webmail accounts. It doesn’t happen often enough to offset the benefits of the program and even when it does happen…you can easily let the program know that this is a safe address (thus avoiding future spam filtering).

There are also commercial (you pay for it) spam filtering tools. Here is a very comprehensive list from PCMag.com with ratings.

In summary, if you are being plagued by spam and you use a windows email client (sorry, don’t know what is available for mac users) - there are definitely options available that would make checking email less of a headache.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Announcements, Website Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.