Increase Your Free Time With a Spam Blocker

Will a spam filter help you free up time? I spend so much time weeding the spam out of my mailbox that it is unbelievable, or at least I did. It is an unfortunate fact that a good spam blocker is an absolute necessity with any computer that has email and internet access to it. Spam is simply unsolicited email that is usually a part of some sort of commercial advertising strategy. It is the email equivalent of junk mail and has been a part of email life for years now. You should really consider a good spam blocker because the truth is that spam presents a great deal more trouble than just the pain of weding out advertisements.

So why is spam such a problem? I mean do you really have to get a spam blocker? The answer is yes because spam eats up the electronic resources on your computer like memory and storage. Spam may also have viruses that can shut down your computer or your network if you have one. It can also contain scams that can trick some of the less savvy users of the internet and email. What a good spam blocker will do is stop the messages before they ever hit your inbox, thus saving you space, memory, and the threat of unsavory offers.

Another way a spam blocker will help you is in terms of your time. Even if the spam you receive does not contain viruses and really is just a series of advertisements, it takes a lot of time to delete and filter out all the spam in your inbox. If the email in question is one you use for work, then think how much more productive you can be with a spam blocker keeping you from having to read and delete a bunch of advertisements.

If you are a business owner, the same applies. Your employees will be much more productive if you get a good spam blocker put in with the email. It will save time in reading bad emails as well as help protect you from the threat of viruses or spyware. Spam is a problem and can really hold back a business as much as it can an individual, so give some consideration to getting a good spam blocker so that you can save your business time and money.

Spam has been around pretty much since the internet and email first became popular. It is difficult to define and recognize, but laws are still passed to help slow it down or stop it. The problem is that often times the spammers are ignoring such laws and sending their messages out anyway. All this means is that no matter how many laws or acts are passed, a good spam blocker is a necessity to keep your computer and to keep your email running smoothly. In addition, it will save you time and frustration every time you log on to check your email messages.

How To Choose A Spam Blocker – Filter Software

So How Do You Choose Spam Blocker software? Should you go for an integrated solution, standalone or web-based? Will it work with your email client and is future upgrades an important feature? Or should you just buy the most popular ones and trust that is the right way to go? Tough questions we know. That’s why we have done the research for you so that you may choose a Spam Blocker which is best for your needs.

Usually, there are three sorts of spam blockers:-

1. Integrated

2. Standalone

3. Online

We’ll look at each sort and enlighten the pros and cons of each.

Integrated Spam Blocker

This sort of spam filtering software is the most joint. Once installed it sits “on top” of your existing email application and installs a new set of buttons into your email software. In future when you gather email you’ll see options for marking email as Spam, marking the email as Not Spam, Bounce the email back to sender, etc. The description and side of these buttons varies from one creation to the next but their functions linger the same.

Most integrated spam blockers indeed ally place alleged dump email into a split folder on your PC for you to journal or cancel later on.

The newer integrated spam blockers are also “intelligent”. They can mostly learn the difference between what spams is and what is not and cancel the dump email you don’t want.

Standalone Spam Blocker

These are fewer joint than their integrated counterpart but that doesn’t make them any fewer nifty. A standalone spam blocker is mostly a split example of software installed on your PC that you use to catch your email for spam.

You will have to launch your spam blocker software first. After you are done processing emails on the attendant, then launch your accepted email software to download them.

Standalone filters have the big plus of being able to journal your email on the mail attendant before it’s downloaded to your PC. This one solitary feature has the huge profit of allowing you to just download legitimate emails as different to downloading all of your email, counting spam, and then taxonomy through it.

With a standalone spam blocker is a little more work austerely because it’s a split example of software that you have to run before you open up your email software. Most standalone filters allocate you to configure them so that your model email application is opened indeed ally once you’ve elected which spam to filter. This suits some people and not others.

The plus is standalone solutions are not software special, so they work with just about any email application.

Online Spam Blocker

There are truly two sorts of online spam blockers. One is for subject use and one is for home use. A normal example of a subject sort creation is iHate Spam attendant magazine where the software cancels dump email soon from the mail attendant before the end client even sees it. Large companies employ this sort of technology.

Other Considerations

These three solutions are the central spam filtering options offered to you. Other questions you might want to ask:-

* Do you necessary protection for more than one email account?

* Do you download email attachments regularly? If so, an integrated virus scanner is vital if you don’t have unwilling-virus installed.

* Do you participate in forums or subscribe to newsletters regularly? If so, a solution which lets you use disposable emails (to accept mail) comes in truly dexterous.

Spam Blockers – Protecting Against Employee Carelessness

Every employer is at least partially aware that their employees use company computers to do personal things, regardless of whether there is a written company policy on appropriate Internet usage. Spam blockers can be a great corporate asset in reducing the amount of damage done by employee carelessness.

Employee computer misuse can result in rendering the company server vulnerable to incoming spam and malware. An effective spam blocker can prevent this type of business risk. A quality spam blocker can detect emails that contain certain words or language, such as pornographic terms or profanity. It can also compare an incoming email to the IPs of known spammers in order to determine whether the email is legitimate.

Another important function of a spam blocker is to provide companies with an overview of incoming spam by employee. If the spam blocker indicates that 80% of the spam emails intercepted were sent to one particular employee, that information can be used to determine that the individual employee is not following corporate computer policies. This allows the employer to follow up and take action before the server is at risk.

A recent Vault.com survey revealed that 90.3% of employees polled said that they surf the web at work. The Computer Security Institute and the FBI surveyed companies and found that 78% of those surveyed reported employee Internet abuse, mostly from downloading pornography and the inappropriate use of email. This occurred whether the company had employed a spam blocker or not.

The largest danger of employees using corporate email and Internet for personal use is the unintentional harvesting of employees’ company email addresses. For example, an employee may want to receive emails from a news website while at work, and therefore provide the news site with their company email address. The address may be harvested by spammers and the corporate server could be deluged with spam. The more spam an employee receives, the higher likelihood that he or she will eventually click on malware and infect the corporate intranet.

Additionally, some spammers engage in “dictionary spamming” where, once the spammer has harvested a legitimate employee address, it will send spam messages to common names using the same naming protocol in the hopes that someone with that name works there. Dealing with this type of spam takes up significant server resources and time.

Although it is important to have clearly defined and communicated computer use policies, a company’s best defense against ever-increasing spam is an effective spam blocker.

Preventing Spam – Adding a Spam Blocker

An important part of your computers defense is a spam blocker (also known as a spam filter). These filters prevent malicious code that is made by virus writers from being transferred onto your computer. Without a proper spam blocker viruses can be used to control a victims computer. To defend against this danger a blocker must be installed.

Spam blockers can be purchased from vendors world wide in either retails store or online. There are many spam blockers that can be downloaded for free from various sites. The most reliable spam blockers usually come with an annual cost but the benefits of having one outweigh the cost.

Filters are programmed with specific jobs to identify spam. I will briefly explain some of the some of the basic features that a filter uses to weed out spam:

Supplied rules and signatures: This is a list of well known list of spamming patterns that is used to identify spam messages.

Filtering policies for enterprises: These are custom made configurations that are made for a specific companies needs.

User preferences: These are the settings that the individual creates once the software is installed on the computer. These setting are focused on types of spam that annoys the user. This also controls how the software will function of the costumer’s computer.

Pre defined blacklists: Another list of the widely known untrusted web addresses. These sites are be default blocked from access. If the user wishes to bypass this setting he must add them to his whitelist.

The last feature is a Quarantine list: This is a place where all messages are stored for the user to manually check. In the case of an accidental block, the user can still retrieve the message.

Once a message has been deemed as spam. It will usually be deleted instantly or within a set period of days.

With this information you should have a general idea of how spam blockers function and defend computers from daily spam.

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