SPAM filtering

[Seer]

Hello.

I need a little help. My dad has asked me to recommend a good SPAM fighting technique. I know next to 0 about SPAM filtering, as I never had to deal with them. He is using Outlook 2007 and gets quite a lot of SPAM (10-20 messages daily), that's all I know. How good is the Outlook inbuilt option? Is it better to have a dedicated app? If so, which one is recommended? He doesn't mind a payware.
I would appreciate any input.

Cheers,

[jpcummins]

I recommend SPAMFighter. There may be better ones but I have found this to be everything I wanted. I am currently using the free version but you can purchase it if you want. I hope I am not violating Forum Policy by posting the link. If I am if one of the Moderators would delete the link I would appreciate it.

http://www.spamfighter.com

John

[acr1965]

If your dad has his email imported to Outlook from only one source (or, at least the spam is mostly to one email address) then I would suggest Mailwasher free version. There's also xTerminator which is basically the same as Mailwasher but can be used for several email account sources. The downside is that xTerminator does not seem to integrate with Outlook as seamlessly as Mailwasher. xTerminator is free though. Then there is always the option of setting up a gmail account and routing everything through there as it seems to have a very good spam detection ability.

[1boss1]

-{ Quote: "I recommend SPAMFighter. There may be better ones but I have found this to be everything I wanted. I am currently using the free version but you can purchase it if you want. I hope I am not violating Forum Policy by posting the link. If I am if one of the Moderators would delete the link I would appreciate it.

http://www.spamfighter.com

John" }-

Thanks for the link, looks interesting but i noticed one thing:

-{ Quote: "If a SPAMfighter receives a spam mail that is not detected by SPAMfighter, the user reports the spam mail with one click, and it's removed from the rest of the SPAMfighter community in seconds.

6,633,195 users are already spam free with SPAMfighter" }-

This seems a little dangerous, one user could flag legitimate mail as spam and impact another 6.6 million users.

Is there a way to over ride this so spam detection doesn't rely on the community, but only relies on your own keywords/patterns?

[YeOldeStonecat]

Did you turn on the one built into Outlook yet? It's definitions get updated monthly via Microsoft Updates. Since you already have it...why not try it? It's not bad.

[JohnnyDollar]

-{ Quote: "Did you turn on the one built into Outlook yet? It's definitions get updated monthly via Microsoft Updates. Since you already have it...why not try it? It's not bad." }-

I agree, you ought to try it out. You can set different filtering levels and create rules with it.

[jpcummins]

1boss1

Whenever I access my email SPAMFighter indicates the emails that it has detected as spam. I am given the option to delete these emails or to unblock them. This would I believe offer protection should another SPAMFighter accidentally block legitimate email. But, I have forwarded your question to SPAMFighter support and will post their answer to your question once I receive it.

John

[trjam]

http://antispamsniper.com/

this is the best I have ever found and support is great.

[Seer]

Many thanks to all of you. For now, this is more than sufficient info, and just the right amount of suggestions not to overwhelm a SPAM newbie.

YeOldeStonecat, yes, I would rather like if filtering could be done natively, so I'll look into that first.

-{ Quote: "It's definitions get updated monthly via Microsoft Updates." }-
I remember these updates, as I also have Outlook 2007 on one of my machines (I don't use it, but it gets updates anyway). Before my initial post, I have actually set Outlook's Junk filter to "high" (it was on "low" by default) to see if that would change anything.

I'll also try other suggestions to see how they fare compared to Outlook's native filter, trialing each for a few days. I have done a bit of research and noticed that SPAMfighter is mentioned in high regards on several review sites. Mailwasher seems qutie popular, so I'll have to check out why. I have never heard of AntispamSniper, but I'll try it, looks interesting.
Thanks again to all who replied.
Regards,

[acr1965]

This poll is a little dated but fairly comprehensive-

http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=210424

[ASM]

Try SpamAid (http://www.spamaid.com/), it's not free but upgrade to future version is zero dollar.

[jpcummins]

1boss1

I heard back from SPAMfighter support and hear is what they said:

Each time you block a spam mail, SPAMfighter takes a snapshot of the contents of the email and sends it to the SPAMfighter server. If other people block the same message, it is filtered out for the rest of the community. If enough users think it is spam, and block the email, it will be filtered for all our users. This means that you will still receive the same email that you block after you block it; until it gets enough points from all SPAMfighter users - enough to be "real" spam.

When you use blacklist, you do not report anything to the SPAMfighter server, it only affeccts your mail. When you blacklist an email address or a domain, you just stop people from those address from mailing you. It will not stop spammers, but if you receive a newsletter you can not unsubscribe from or someone you do not like keeps contacting you, you can stop them by blacklisting them.

John

[1boss1]

-{ Quote: "1boss1

I heard back from SPAMfighter support and hear is what they said:

Each time you block a spam mail, SPAMfighter takes a snapshot of the contents of the email and sends it to the SPAMfighter server. If other people block the same message, it is filtered out for the rest of the community. If enough users think it is spam, and block the email, it will be filtered for all our users. This means that you will still receive the same email that you block after you block it; until it gets enough points from all SPAMfighter users - enough to be "real" spam.

When you use blacklist, you do not report anything to the SPAMfighter server, it only affeccts your mail. When you blacklist an email address or a domain, you just stop people from those address from mailing you. It will not stop spammers, but if you receive a newsletter you can not unsubscribe from or someone you do not like keeps contacting you, you can stop them by blacklisting them.

John" }-

Ah ha, thanks very much for the info. That makes much more sense, dealing with spam blocklists and filtering is tricky to get right especially when using data from a wider community.

One mans spam is anothers legitimate mail, then there's the potential for abuse depending how they handle "spamvertising". But SpamFighter.com looks good, their stats are mind numbing..

-{ Quote: "The last 24 hours:
Processed emails 25,190,830
Blocked spam 21,798,927" }-

I have my own servers which handle my mail and filtering, but i'm after something for my mothers Outlook so i will give this a shot.

Thanks.

[noblelord]

I tried SPAMfighter with Thunderbird and couldn't get it to work. It worked fine with Outlook (my corporate e-mail and general e-mail account), but I couldn't get it to work with Thunderbird (my secure encrypted e-mail). I emailed SPAMfighter support yesterday and am waiting to hear back from them.

Has anybody else had a problem with Thunderbird? No toolbar ever appears, nor does it create a SPAMfighter folder within my e-mail account.