I wouldn't post this if I hadn't tried it... and I paid for it myself, so don't anybody be thinking I'm reviewing something someone sent me!

Long ago and far away I got very tired of local ISPs and 2nd phone lines and took the plunge and got hooked up to cable... yeah I know the 2nd phone line concept may be hard for everyone to understand, but that's how it was in 'the old days'. To avoid having to change email addresses all the time, I decided to buy a domain name, get minimal hosting, and use that for all email into the house. That way if I changed providers, all the email addresses wouldn't have to change.

Of course, about a dozen domains later, I have LOTS of pop email addresses and even an exchange address to my client's server... times have changed.

What also has changed is the fact that we get SPAM... 'back in the day' when I was a beta tester for the first ISP in Phoenix, someone tried sending an ad to all of us, and what he got in return for his trouble was a bunch of core dumps that locked up his email... if you don't know what a core dump is, ask your grandfather.

But in today's world, we're all much more civilized than that, and as with many things, the criminals seem to have much more rights than we do, so we get inundated with email offering all sorts of wild schemes that you'd have to be brain-dead to accept, but yet... if people weren't accepting them, they'd stop sending them.

I keep hoping that survival of the smartest would weed out the mental midgets that respond and then the jumk email stop, but that hasn't happened yet anymore than finding high-quality hearing aids at the checkout line of Safeway because of all the dimwits playing music too loud inside their car... but that's another whole topic and I digress.


So what's the solution for all the spam?

And I mean *all*... on that old personal email address, I am now getting over 150 spam messages a day! Yes I know that's why God invented the delete key, but I took it on as a challenge, and it's a matter of principle... why should I switch email addresses, or convert from [email protected] to something else, or have all my email filtered through some service just because some A-Hole somewhere has a site up trying to phish Ma & Pa Kettle (ask your grandfather about that too) out of their retirement money?

Well... I got an email from my cousin the other day while I was writing yet another email rule, and there was a banner on the bottom of his email that said he was protected by SPAMfighter.

SPAMfighter huh.... so I took a look at their site, and found yet one more of the supposed tools to help us.

But... I read that they're a Microsoft Gold Partner... and that doesn't come lightly... so I took a gamble and here's what I found:

I installed it, and had to do a couple things:

1) SPAMfighter stuffed the SPAMfighter folder into my client's exchange address... I deleted it, made a new SPAMfighter folder where I wanted it to go, then in the SPAMfighter Clients settings for Outlook, I told it to put all spam there.

2) It didn't seem to be doing anything. There's a ribbon button that you can select "Block", and I did that, wondering if I was 'training' it, but it wasn't picking up duplicates

3) I sent email to support, and wrote a post on the forum (not to self: reply to that post). By the time the folks from the home office responded, it was the next day, and first up, SPAMfighter knocked down everything that came through when Outlook opend... two thumbs up!

I disabled my 'garbage collection' rule from Outlook, and told Outlook not to use the junk folder thinking it was interfering.

4) Day 2 seemed to go about like Day 1... but I hung in there.

5) Day 3 is now a whole new day... I had left Outlook open and hadn't looked at the PC since sometime late yesterday afternoon, and when I looked this morning, *every bit* of spam was in the SPAMfighter folder!!


I'm a new paying customer

After watching SPAMfighter work this morning, I've purchased a 1-year license, and I now can sit and watch as emails come in and disappear from my inbox into the SPAMfighter folder.

No more continual tweaking of the rules. I've got SPAMfighter set to 'Very Hard' filtering... personally I'd rather pull the few real emails out of the SPAMfighter folder than pull spam out of the real folders.

Yes this is simply another way of using the delete key, but you know what? ... it feels good :)

Here's a screenshot of the stats after just about 48 hours of being onboard:



Note that all the ones blocked by me were during Day 1 and 2... I've blocked none today, and everything is blocked.


Stay in the 'Light!