One of the problems with internet thievery, spam, popups, viruses, malware, Trojans, is that you have to spend a few bucks if you ever want to get full on, no-stone-left-unturned protection. There are some great free programs out there, but there are also some where, well, you wind up with exactly what you paid for, and when you paid zero dollars for it… well… it’s kind of like having a wet paper towel instead of the Great Wall of China to fight off the Mongolian Invaders.
The fact of the matter is that you’re always going to have this in each and every market. Right now, everybody needs virus, spam, Trojan, and worm protection, so computer security is a hot market. Heck, just ask one of those tech support companies. They’re always recruiting, even during a recession. Whenever there’s a hot market, there’s always going to be some people trying to turn over a buck. Even with free antispam, you can still collect banner ad revenue and so on. I guess we can be happy that they’re trying to get rich quick on antispam, and not spam.
So while you’re only going to get full protection with something like McAfee or Barracuda, that’s not to say there are no good free internet security programs.
For viruses, get yourself Avira AntiVir, for Microsoft Exchange, try SmartPOP, and for email, your best bet is probably going to be either POPFile or eXpurgate.
POPFile is great if you just want a simple, no frills, spam killing machine piece of software. You don’t have to worry about a bunch of configuration files or anything, it just gets the job done.
eXpurgate is better for the more experienced users, as you will have a few settings to customize. Once you’ve done this, though, it does kill around eighty to ninety nine percent of all spam mail, and the configuration itself isn’t such a tricky process, just click a few check boxes until you’re happy with your settings.
So to simply answer the question of whether or not there are any halfway decent free antispam programs out there, yes, there are. The problem is that you can’t just grab any free antispam program off the shelf and hope it works like a dream. POPFile and eXpurgate are two of the rare examples of free programs that work as well as some of the paid programs. There are some other ones out there of almost the same quality, but these two are probably the best.
