"corporate email account".
So, does that mean you use MS Exchange or some other groupware-capable
mail server? Or does "corporate" really mean you just use POP3 and SMTP
server from whomever is your Internet provider?
If you are using POP3/SMTP, check out the following non-exclusive list:
- SpamPal: Works by interrogating the headers so it determines spam by
where it came from, not by using bad word lists or sender e-mail
addresses which are tenuous and near worthless. Add the Bayesian and
HTML-Modify plug-ins (use RegEx if you want more filtering). All are
free; not crippleware, not nagware, not adware, just good freeware.
- SpamNet: I tried this during its beta release when it was free. Too
flaky, it would crash or hang and take Outlook with it. Now it costs
money.
- SpamAssassin: Never tried it. Might be only for Unix/Linux users.
- K9: Heard of it. Never tried it.
- A Google search on "spam filter" or "anti-spam software" turns up lots
of matches.
For me, I use SpamPal. I also use Magic Mail Monitor because they have
filter rules you can define within the mail monitor. I've always found
Outlook too flaky to keep loaded; it doesn't handle connect and login
errors too well and I get tired of having to close its bogus
username/password prompts. By having a more stable e-mail monitor
always running that also provide for rules within it, I can have it
detect spam using SpamPal. I could have the e-mail monitor download
part or all of the message body so SpamPal's Bayesian plug-in can check
the body for "spamminess" but that would slow the downloads, and it's
only rarely that the Bayesian plug-in catches something that SpamPal
when using DNSBLs (DNS blacklists) doesn't detect as spam. A rule in
the e-mail monitor looks for the special "X-SpamPal: SPAM" header added
by SpamPal for spam. It then deletes that message from the server. I
never get bothered being notified that new e-mail arrived when it was
just spam. I never have to bother wasting the time to download the spam
into my e-mail client to use SpamPal there by a rule along with other
spam-catch rules to delete it. Magic has a rules.log where you can
check if SpamPal marked something as spam which you then deleted on the
server using a rule in Magic but which really wasn't spam. I think I've
had one false positive in the last 2 months.
SpamPal is a local proxy to which any POP3-compliant e-mail client can
connect, so I can use it with Outlook, Outlook Express, Magic Mail
Monitor, or whatever is my fancy.
Magic Mail Monitor lets me see when new e-mail arrives. By using its
rules along with SpamPal, it will automatically delete spam at the
server and I never get bothered being alerted about it, having to review
a list of junked e-mails, or waste the time to download it into my
e-mail client. My setup is as follows where the values in parenthesis
is the protocol and the values in brackets are the port numbers:
For my ISPs' accounts (I have 2 of them):
POP3: client (POP3) <-- [6110] SpamPal (POP3) <-- [110] ISP's POP3
server
SMTP: client (SMTP) --> [25] ISP's SMTP server
For my Yahoo accounts (their freebie accounts so I don't have to pay for
their POP3 service):
POP3: client (POP3) <-- [6110] SpamPal (POP3) <-- [7110] YahooPOPs
(HTTP) <-- Yahoo webmail
SMTP: client (SMTP) --> [25] ISP's SMTP server
Alt. SMTP: client (SMTP) --> [7125] YahooPOPs (HTTP) --> Yahoo webmail
For my Hotmail accounts (all freebie accounts):
POP3: client (POP3) <-- [6110] SpamPal (POP3) <-- [8110] Hotmail Popper
(HTTP) <-- Hotmail
SMTP: client (SMTP) --> [25] ISP's SMTP server
Alt. SMTP: client (SMTP) --> [8125] Hotmail Popper (HTTP) --> Hotmail
The "client" shown above is Outlook, Outlook Express, Magic Mail
Monitor, or any other POP3-complaint e-mail client program. For both
Yahoo and Hotmail, I could have used the SMTP server provided by
YahooPOPs and Hotmail Popper to originate my outbound e-mails from those
accounts (as shown by the "Alt. SMTP" setup), but my ISP's SMTP server
is faster, more reliable, and I'm not trying to hide from where my
e-mail originates. Also, if you send your outbound e-mails through the
freebie webmail provider, they might slap on their spam promotional
signature onto the end of your e-mails (but testing with Hotmail Popper
shows that this spam sig does not get added).
At one time, I had the e-mail accounts in Outlook use the standard or
default port numbers for the POP3 and SMTP servers (which connected to
SpamPal). However, I also use Norton's Antivirus which transparently
hijacks ports 25 and 110. Sometimes software that tries to share a port
doesn't work. NAV's ccapp.exe would sometimes become unresponsive which
would kill mail polling even if NAV's e-mail scanning were disabled. So
I decided to have SpamPal use different ports than the ones that the
antivirus software had hijacked. Since SpamPal, YahooPOPs, and Hotmail
Popper all run as local proxies, and since you can chain them, this
gives me the ability to:
- Detect spam using SpamPal along with using many of its other features,
like blocking by country, whitelists, automatic whitelisting,
blacklists, selecting less or more agressive public blacklists, using a
Bayesian filter, using HTML-Modify to strip out the nasties from
HTML-formatted e-mails (but you should also ensure the Restricted Sites
security zone is used for e-mail), and more.
- Use YahooPOPs to yank e-mails from Yahoo without having to use their
webmail interface and not having to pay them for their POP3 service.
Yahoo does not provide discounts when you have multiple Yahoo accounts,
and I'm not paying for each one that I use there.
- Use Hotmail Popper to support more than one Hotmail account and not
get screwed over with the HTTPmail Hotmail account in Outlook going
offline because Hotmail happens to be unresponsive for one mail poll,
and I have to remember to put it back online.
- Use an e-mail monitor program, Magic Mail Monitor, which has rules
which can detect SpamPal's marking of spam and delete it from the
server. I never get bothered being notified of new e-mail which is
really spam. I don't waste time downloading the spam to detect it
through SpamPal and Outlook rules to then delete it on my end. I used
to use POP Peeper to monitor my POP3, Yahoo, and Hotmail accounts but I
got tired of me doing the spam filtering by deleting it off the server.
An e-mail monitor with rules has it do the deleting for me.
I might've used MailWasher instead of Magic Mail Monitor except for some
deficiences. The freebie version of Mailwasher only supports one
account. I currently have seven e-mail accounts. Mailwasher Free has
filters (I don't know how extensive they are) but the 1-account limit
was the bust on using this product. I could pay for the Pro version to
support more than one account, but why when I can get the functionality
for free? If you get Mailwasher (free or pro), **NEVER** use the bounce
feature. That will result in you getting *more* spam as you have
potentially identified your e-mail account as both valid AND monitored.
You sending bounces is NOT the same as your mail server bouncing back
messages regarding an non-existing account.
That's my long-winded description of what I use. If I find something
better (and preferrably free or very cheap) then I'll use that instead.
But SpamPal, it's Bayesian and HTML-Modify plug-ins, and about a dozen
rules in my client (Outlook and Magic) gets rid of a lot of spam. I
think I get about 1 spam per 2 days leaking past this setup. Remember
that if your ISP or webmail provider includes anti-spam features then be
sure to enable them. My ISPs have anti-spam filtering so I've enabled
it. They don't let me define server-side rules to catch a bit more spam
that leaks by their filters. Yahoo and Hotmail have anti-spam filters
to I've enabled it there, too. Both let me define some crude rules at
the server to help eliminate some of the leaks past their filtering.
Then SpamPal and my client (Outlook and Magic) rules take care of the
rest. Occasionally I'll visit the rules.log for Magic just to see how
much spam leaked by the provider's spam filters, and each time I grin as
I note all the crap that never got to me. Yes!
