A question I hear a lot… are those free spam filters any good? Do they get the job done on any level whatsoever at all?
Well, the answer is kind of complicated. I’ll tell you, I have yet to encounter a perfect spam filter. Now, this isn’t meant as a harsh criticism of the better spam filters out there. Without Gmail’s spam filter, for example, I know I’d be wading through about five hundred junk emails before getting to the one or two messages I need to read. It’s just that even the best spam filters will, on occasion, take an email you absolutely need, and drop it right into the spam box. Luckily, most email clients hold the spam before deleting it, so you can double check and make sure, but that only makes it slightly less annoying.
As far as free spam filters go, they all suffer from this same problem time and again. The fact is that spam filtering is generally based on “clues” that something is spam, rather than absolute proof. So even a great spam filter will sometimes see an email that was sent by a bot, and delete it, even though it’s a bot that you actually needed to receive an email from. So this isn’t a flaw of the spam filter itself, but of spam filters in general.
So now that we’ve gotten that out of the way… yes, there are some good free spam filters out there, but you can’t just grab any one of them at random and hope for the best, you should look around a little and make sure you’re getting the best free spam filter you can find. Luckily, most email providers already have a good built in spam detector, but if you’re not getting your email through Gmail or something, then you do need a spam filter.
As far as we can tell, ExPurgate might be the best free anti-spam program out there. The system works by a simple process of creating a dummy account for your email. The dummy account will check out all the email coming into your real account, and then forward the good stuff to your actual account. Another good one is POPFile, which is pretty easy to adjust to your own particular needs. Either way, if your email’s automatic spam filter isn’t cutting it, one of these two should get the job done.
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