Better Spam Filters for Outlook Express

With spam, it’s much like human viruses, computer viruses run the gamut from the benign to the fatally destructive to the computers they infect. And just as with human viruses, prevention is better than cure. Prevention begins by stopping them in their tracks at the portals of contact.  This is where a firewall can come in handy.

The ideal firewall will hide the ports that a hacker might use to gain access to your PC and protect your home PC from attacks, as well as track those attempted entries and prohibit unauthorized access or output from your computer. Two-way firewalls are the best as they block the threats that are incoming OR outgoing, to prevent things such s virus, Trojans or malware from being installed without you knowing it.

The harm spam can do

To understand just how big a problem spam has become, it will help to realize the sheer volume of unsolicited junk mail is sent out every day. More than 50% of all the trillions of email that is mailed out is spam. This spam clogs up and wastes bandwidth, especially with the recent advent of image-based spam. It places a huge strain on servers and wastes a huge amount of time and money to deliver millions upon millions of unsolicited emails to the inboxes of recipients.

A insidious tactic that the spammers employ is called "Phishing." It involves the spammer sending out junk email that is specifically designed to look like it is from a reputable, legitimate source such as a reputable company like ebay or paypal. This spam utilizes the company's logo and official graphics.

A 2006 study by Consumer Reports estimated that in two years, Americans spent more than $7 billion on repairs and parts replacement resulting from viruses, malware and spyware. This does not take into account the cost to the Internet Providers who have to pay for all the bandwidth taken up by the spammers junk, or the cost in time, money and productivity to businesses that have to sort through all the spam.

The whitelists

A whitelist is a database of trusted email addresses, IP addresses and domains. To build the list, each one of these trusted sources is manually added to the whitelist. Only email from a whitelisted source is delivered to the user's inbox. In fact, whitelists are so effective, that the catch-rate for spam is almost 100%.

The advantage of this method is that it is not worth it to spammers to wade through all the challenge-response emails and respond to them. They are more likely to remove the email address from their lists and go after other addresses that do not have such requirements. However, the inconvenience of having to register to send email to the whitelist user may discourage legitimate email senders from following through.