Free Program To Deal With Spam Effectively
There's no doubt about it. Spam can be one of the biggest wastes of time as you work towards having a successful site online. With the ever increasing number of spam emails, it is becoming critically important to find a solution that is effective in filtering out spam. The problem with most spam filters is that they do their work in an unintelligent manner. That is they only look for certain words like "viagra" or swear words. You run into problems because it is either not effective enough or it filters out legitimate emails as well as spam.
A Solution That Works
Their is one spam filtering program that has proven to be extremely effective for me. Popfile is a free program which works between your email program and your email account. You configure your email program (Outlook, Pegasus, Eudora etc) so that it gets your email through the popfile program. Popfile uses a sophisticated filtering system called the Bayesian filter. It is widely recognized by experts as one of the best filtering methods available. Popfile studies many factors about the incoming email to determine if it is spam or not. As the emails are downloaded through Popfile, they are analyzed for specific characteristics typical for spam. It labels each email by adding a label to the subject line as they are downloaded. For example if you told popfile that you want spam email to be labelled with: [spam] in the subject line, it will do so. So when a spam email is trying to get to you that has the subject line "get your diploma now!" popfile makes the subject line "[spam] get your diploma now!"
Filtering With Your Email Program It is important to realize that you do not go into popfile itself to read your emails. You set up your email program work with popfile. Your email program is set to filter out any emails with the subject line containing: [spam] (I send all of mine to the "deleteable folder" I created in Pegasus). Here is the url for popfiles list of email programs and how to configure it correctly.
When you are using the filtering options with your email program, have it search for subject lines which contain that labels that popfile is attaching automatically. It is important not to choose the "exact match" that may be offered when setting a filter up. This is because some programs handle that exact match to mean those words and those words only in the subject line. This isn't the case because the label is in addition to the rest of the subject line. Here are some of the other filters I apply to my incoming mail:
- [ok] - for any emails which are normal and deserve my attention
- [spam] - spam
- [sbws] - for Small Business Web Site day to day emails
- [receipts] - any online purchases I make get sent automatically to my receipt folder
- [urgent] - if I am working on an important project, I will train popfile to mark their email with this
- [autoresp} - sign up confirmations to my autoresponders automatically get sorted and saved
- [newsletters] - any newsletters I sign up for get filtered to the proper folder for reading at my discretion
The important thing with Popfile is to initially "train it" so that it gets more accurate. This is especially important when you first start using the program. Each time you correct it, the programs becomes more efficient. Every few hundred emails or so, you can go into the configuration portion of the program and correct any more errors it might have made. When you see an email that should have been labeled as spam but wasn't you "reclassify it" and popfile learns from that. I am achieving a 99.4%+ accuracy rate with popfile. I know this because the program keeps track:
I rarely go in to correct it anymore because it is very accurate. Keep in mind that you can do some filtering with email programs already but they generally are not as efficient as popfile in sniffing out spam. By having popfile label each incoming email, it is then very easy to have your email program sort by the subject line label that has been assigned to it.
Once you have the program running smoothly, it is completely automatic and very helpful. It can help reclaim minutes every day by sorting out junk email that you don't have to waste your time on.
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