Spam Blocker - How to Protect Your Inbox

Everyone gets SPAM email, it's a fact of life. Twenty five billion email messages are being sent daily and 15 billion of them are spam. If you have email at work you'll tend to get three times as much spam email than you do at your personal email address. With so much spam in our inboxes it's taking more and more time to sort out the good email and the junk. Does this sound like you? It certainly sounds like us and we decided to do something about it.

How to Protect Your Inbox

There are variety of paid and free tools on the market that promise to block, filter, or otherwise protect your inbox from spam. We found one free tool that signifcantly cut down on inbox spam. The tool is called SpamPal and works by 'filtering' messages before they get to your inbox. The tool installs as software that runs on your machine. When you get email the software checks the message against databases of spam email worldwide and then filters it as spam, virus, or good email. The tool isn't perfect, but we found when setup correctly that it catches about 95% of all bad spam email. It also very seldom marks a good email as spam. SpamPal works with email software installed on your computer like Outlook, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird to name a few. If you are using Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, or other Web based email...sorry this isn't for you. It also won't work for the Mac folks.

Tools

Although our settings aren't perfect for everyone, it's a good place to start for most users. Note: All tools and programs listed below are free of charge.

1. The main program
   - Download SpamPal
   
2. Follow the instructions
   - The instructions are available online or can be downloaded to print out
   Read it online or download it separately.
3. Automatic Settings
   - There's a small program that automatically updates the settings to work with SpamPal.
   Automatic Settings
4. Subject: **SPAM**
   - When you get a spam email SpamPal will add the words "**SPAM**" to the beginning of the subject line.
   - You can then add a filter in your email program to move any message with "**SPAM**" in the subject line to a new folder.
   - In our case we had the email moved to a folder named "**SPAM**." This allowed us to review it before deleting it.
   - You could also set the filter to put the message in the garbage or delete it, but we like to review the emails just in case.
5. Make a whitelist
   - The hardest part I found with this program is putting names on the whitelist. The whitelist is a lits of your email address' that shouldn't ever be marked as spam. The program only allows you to add one email address at a time to the list, but there's a plug-in that allows you to add your entire address book at once which is great when setting up the program for the first time.
   Whitelist plugin
6. Blacklists
   - A blacklist is list of email address that you don't want to receive email from. SpamPal uses databases from a variety of sources to identify potential messages as spam or good email. The nice thing is you can choose which blacklists you want the program to use.
   - Choosing the blacklists:
   
   1. Once the SpamPal is running you will see a purple umbrella in the taskbar on the bottom right of your screen.
   2. Right click the umbrella and choose "Options"
   3. Click "Spam-Pal for Windows" until the menu below it opens up
   4. Click "Spam-Detection"
   5. Click "Blacklists"
   6. Click "Public Blacklists"
   7. You now have the choose of pre-determined filter strategies (Safe, Medium, Aggressive, or Custom)
      - I picked "Custom" and essentially chose almost all the lists except for: ipwhois.rfc-ignorant.org, Bulgarian SPAM, and SPEWS
   8. Click "OK" and you're done
7. Extra Settings
   - There's a variety of free plug-ins and extras to extend the power of this program.
   - Plug-ins page
8. Recommend Plug-ins
   - The plug-ins I can recommend are:
   - HTML Modify, this plug-in changes the code in spam email to remove any malicious code before it gets to your inbox (tracking code, web images, and it also says virus' although I've never seen that one work).
   HTML Modify