Spam

[Tom]

I have suffered a large increase in volume since the Doom virus appeared. Much of takes the form of personal name@domainname.co.uk, trying out all the possible personal names, and with an attached virus file detected by Norton. Can anyone recommend a good anti-spam programme? I tried 'training' K9 but got bored with it.

[James]

I use Mailwasher (free from http://www.mailwasher.net).

You have to "train" it though and spammers change their "from" addresses so often that training it does not really help stem the flow.

However, it does allow you to preview and delete the spam while it is still on the mail server and not on your PC. I find this aspect of it well worthwhile. You can bounce the mails back to give the impression your email address is no longer valid.

[David]

If you already use Norton Anti-Virus and like it, you could always move to Norton Internet Security Pro. I use the 2004 version and it has Anti-Spam capability that seems to be pretty good. It detects about 90% of Spam out of the box and you can also train it for further accuracy. It uses your address book to complie an "allowed" list so that you don't inadvertently lose mail from people you know. Unlike Mailwasher, it doesn't scan mail on the server, so you still need to download the stuff but I find it pretty good. I get over 100 spam mails per day and using this has made a big difference.

[Phil]

If you don't mind changing your mail client Mozilla Mail (http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/) has a good built in spam filter.

If you don't mind changing your machine Apple Mail (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/) does it better, though of course MyDoom doesn't affect Macs anyway (as I indignantly pointed out to the head of ILS recently, when he incorrectly accused me of sending him a virus). ;)

[Terry]

Yahoo has a spam filter on their mail as well. It works fairly well - a little too well at times though. I had been deleting the "bulk" mail without looking at it for some time until I accidently discovered that "real" mail had started being diverted to it as well!

Terry