All About AntiSpam Software

The fight between spammers and people who get spammed continues. Whether you are a novice on the Internet, or you use e-mail for a long time, you need to come up with a plan how you will withstand spam. Even these simple tips will help you be one step ahead the spammers and make a spam flow as less as possible.

Have you ever thought about how spammers obtain your email address? One of the methods spammers use is harvesting the emails on the Internet. They don’t do it manually since they need millions of addresses. They automate the process of collecting email addresses with special programs. Spambots are one of the tools that spammers use. A spambot is a program which browses through websites and search for legitimate email addresses. These email addresses are then harvested and stored in big databases. Spammers then use those lists to send their advertisements and fraudulent “get rich quick” plans. They can also sell and re-sell the email lists in order to get money.

Although there is no ideal solution to fool spambots, there are, however, a few techniques that are quite effective.

Spambots won’t harvest your email address if you don’t disclose it. But what about forums, boards, and other public websites that require providing the email address before you can post? You can get an email address with any of free providers of email service and use that email address for public website. If your public email address is harvested, you won't have to worry about what is sent there because you don't use it for e-mail. Use a different email address for your personal mail and make sure to give it out to those people only you know and trust.

Since a Spambot is a programmed tool it can’t be as wise and ingenious as a human. An effective tactic to trick a Spambot is to veil your email address. Spambots are often programmed to search for combinations of characters such as email@domain.com. A small change in your email address, such as email_at_domain.com, will help you fool a spambot. Even if a disguised email address is collected by a spambot that address needs some “adjustment” a spammer can use it. The “adjustment” can hardly be done by a program because there are many variations of an email address. Although a human can discern an email address quite easily, the spammers don’t usually care about it because it is a time consuming work.

A variation of the above tactic is that you can configure your email account so that the recipient of your message will view your address as whatever you want regardless of what your real email address is. The spammers, however, used to apply this trick to hide themselves.

There are many anti-spam solutions available. Anti-spam software will check every email before letting it pass into your inbox. Many spam filters use a complicated arsenal of tools to decide which message is spam and which one is legitimate. You can set the filter so that the emails classified as legitimate will go directly to your inbox, others categorized as junk and spam mail will be sent to a specific “Junk” folder. Certain anti-spam programs like G-Lock SpamCombat allows you preview all your emails before moving spam to trash. If you preview the messages and indicate what is spam indeed and what isn't, you help the program to filter mail more accurately next time. Even the most inveterate spammer will tire of creating new tricks in order to bypass the anti-spam filters because in many cases the benefit won't cost the effort. You can make the price of their efforts higher than their reward.