Spam Filter E-mail - Email Spam Filter

I check my email every morning and 90% of the stuff in my inbox is advertising related content. It's frustrating because although my internet service provider does offer anti spam software on their email servers, I've had it block emails that were actually legitimate and meant for me -- emails from friends overseas or friends emailing me with their work emails, so in turn I had to turn the ISP filter off.

Of course, without any filters running, I would have to filter through all my emails manually every morning. It started to become a problem as the amount of spam emails continued to increase, and eventually I would wake up with 100+ spam emails every morning, with only 5 or so out of the 100 actually being legitimate.

I started to realized that stopping spam email in it's tracks was not so easy. I also became overly frustrated as I started to research for some software that would run on Microsoft Outlook, rather than on the ISP side on their servers. I installed and ran a handful of filters on my computer at home, unfortunately I kept being disappointed. The filters were either time consuming to use or blocked emails that were meant for me (I'm talking about emails sent from University email accounts! How is that spam?).

I then started researching Spam more deeply and I came across an interesting idea. The idea is based around the way we as people manually filter our inbox. For instance, if you gave a stranger your email account they could no doubt filter your spam as well, it's not hard to see what is unwanted junk. So why is it so hard to make a software spam filter that will filter emails depending on their content? For instance, advertising related keywords appearing in the email more than once will automatically flag that email as advertisement or spam. It is easy for us to recognize a spam email, we see phrases such as Buy Viagra Now and we automatically know it's spam! Why can't software do the same thing?

I did settle for a reasonably good spam filter though, and I've been running it for almost a month now without any real problems. This kind of software is the closest we can get at the moment to being 100% reliable. Although, I must say it's been running so far blocking all spam emails without blocking one single legitimate email -- which is pretty good if you ask me!

Julian is an IT expert and webmaster. If you want to find out more about spam filtering or grab a hold of a special spam software package then check this website out.