The most effective spam defense is to apply a good spam filter to your mailbox. Filtering means identifying messages as spam rather than good mail and then deleting them. Some filters also do automatic SpamReporting, and some filters learn from the filtering in order to improve it's own accuracy.

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Server-side spam filters (if you run your own mail server)

If you control your own mail server, you can look into these options:

1. DSpam (new; rumored to beat SpamAssassin in installation/maintenance/performance)
2. SpamAssassin (very popular)
3. VipulsRazor? (used by DreamHost)
4. Our recommendation: switch to DreamHost and use the new filter they provide (as of July 2004, it's still in beta but will be the standard for all customers soon). It's a solution called "Amavis+ClamAV+SpamAssasin" which is very close to 100% accurate. It certainly meets our needs.

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Client-side spam filters (on your own pc)

Spamcop.net is the most effective defense against spam mails that we know of. Spamcop.net is an online service that uses a number of blacklists to filter your mailbox, and/or it can submit individual e-mails for automatic SpamReporting.
The advantage is that it works automatically, so you don't have to think about it (except paying the yearly fee). It is very good, but after some time we felt that it wasn't worth $30 per mailbox per year, so we stopped using it.

MailWasher is another excellent spam filter for your pc which is an application that you install on your pc. It is free, but don't let that fool you. It is very friendly to use, and very accurate because you control it yourself. Based on built-in filters, and those that you add, it filters spam away pretty well. It can't report spam to any blacklist authority like Spamcop.net does. MailWasher isn't automatic: you'll have to run it, review the result, and then (let it) start your mail program. The result is that your mailbox will be absolutely clean, but the price is that you must do the processing yourself. So why not skip this program and just do it manually in the mail program? Well, at least MailWasher makes good guesses for you, so you just have to review and accept the good/bad filtering.

Death2Spam is another simple spam filter. As the documentation states: "There's nothing to install, and you won't need to change your email address to use our service. Simply point your email reader at the Death2Spam? Mail Server, then retrieve your Internet mail as usual. Spam will be "tagged" in such a way that your email software can easily filter it into the trash. To begin using the Death2Spam? Internet Mail Filtering Service, simply change some information in your email program, then retrieve your email messages just as you normally do."
For details, see http://death2spam.com/ and http://death2spam.com/docs/email-setup.html

Mozilla Mail (and Thunderbird) has a built-in spam filter that will route all suspected spam into a special "Junk mail" folder. Moreover, the filter uses a bayesian analysis of your personal email traffic to actually learn and improve itself. Out-of-the-box its junk mail detection is rather good, but given a few thousand emails it becomes quite excellent in catching even the most innocent-looking junk mails. [ JanGB ]

SPF

The SenderPolicyFramework? (SPF) is like having caller ID on e-mails and can help against fake mail from your address.

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There are many other spam filtering tools available. See Google:spam+filter.

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Spam-related topics: