GeekForce

What does an enterprising geek like me do on an early Sunday morning?
Kill SPAM.
Estimates of the amount of time and money that are wasted dealing with SPAM are in the $20 per user range. For a small company, that can be a real drain on resources. For a large company, like, say, a multi national bank, it adds up quick.
One of my many email addresses is about 5 years old now, and I also get all of the mail for geekforce.com. That adds up to alot of SPAM. Services like Yahoo! Mail have pretty sophisticated SPAM filters set up, and that is one of the reasons that I have an accnt. with them. It’s also free. (Well, if you ignore the ads, but I digress). Having installed and tested a few personal spam filters, I wanted to share my impressions….

The first product that I tried was Spam Inspector from Giant. This is a commercial product and works very well. Depending on what program you use to get mail, you need to install a different version of the program. There are versions for both Outlook Express and Outlook 2000, as well as AOL.
This will install a extra set of buttons on your toolbar, and combined with some sophisticated filtering that happens in the background, sends most of the SPAM to your deleted items. Not bad. You also get the option of flagging the offending message as SPAM, and it goes away. I liked it. Demo expired though, and I since I have some car repairs to pay for (see last post), I started looking for something free.
Enter SpamNet. I just installed it, but it looks like it is taking the Seti At Home approach to SPAM. By accumulating what thousands of people flag as SPAM, it shows some promise. I just installed it, will write more as I can develop an impression.