The best cure is, of course, a large dose of prevention. While this advice may come too late, consider it the next time you acquire a new email address. Spammers acquire email addresses using several techniques, and chief among them are harvesting and guessing. In the first case, spammers use automated software-based search agents to scour Web pages for email addresses. If your email address is listed anywhere, such as on a directory or a Web site contact form, it may fall into a spammer’s hands. The other technique is more of a blunt method: Spammers just invent email addresses and fire away. This is a useful technique in the case of popular domain names, such as yahoo.com or hotmail.com.

So how do you defend against these techniques? For starters, you can get an email address on a lesser-known (or even better, your own) domain, and don’t publish that email address anywhere, under any circumstances (see the “Get Email @Yourdomain.com” sidebar).

When It’s Already Too Late

For most of us, the problem is unavoidable: You already have an email address that you wish to keep. So, in that case, how do you prevent the flood of spam? We will examine three paths to an emptier inbox.

Switch email programs. Most modern email programs include a built-in spam filter. But if you’re still using Windows 98 with the default installation of Outlook Express, it might be time to consider a move. For example, the free Mozilla Thunderbird email client (www.mozilla.com/thunderbird) is easy to download and install, and it includes a trainable spam filter. To use Thunderbird’s spam filter, go to Tools and select Account Settings. You’ll see a number of items related to the management of your email account. Next, choose Junk Settings and ensure that Enable Adaptive Junk Mail Controls For This Account is selected. With this feature activated, you’ll be able to train the program to recognize spam. As any spam enters your inbox, you can click the Junk button in Thunderbird’s toolbar. After a couple of weeks of this kind of work, you’ll start to notice significantly less spam in your inbox.

Install a third-party spam filter. If you don’t want to switch email programs, or you’re finding it too onerous to play schoolmaster to your email program, other solutions abound. As the tide of junk mail has increased, so, too, have enterprising software publishers rushed in to offer help. There are too many solutions to list here, but one application that we recommend is Spamihilator. Fortunately, it’s easier to use than it is to pronounce.

Spamihilator (www.spamihilator.com), and many other third-party applications, works as a proxy to your mail server: It sits between your mail server and your computer, intercepting all the messages that come in, cleaning them up, and passing on the survivors to you. It’s a very elegant and simple system, requiring no training on your part. It uses a spam-probability system called Bayesian filtering to determine whether a message is legitimate or spam. This technique is currently the most effective means of automatically detecting spam.

Spamihilator runs as a background application. You set it up with your email server credentials, and it automatically pulls your emails in and configures your mail client to get its messages from Spamihilator rather than your mail server. You can also go into Spamihilator to view the logs of the messages it’s marking as spam and make corrections as necessary. With some tenacity, you will end up with a spam removal rate of at least 98%. Do you want one more reason to try this application? It’s free.

Use Gmail. For the technically minded, our third option will take spam management entirely out of your hands. In our testing, we’ve found Google’s spam filtering to be second-to-none, and it demands absolutely no maintenance on your part.

You can use an existing Gmail account, or your can set up a new one for this purpose, at mail.google.com. You can use it to filter all your email, even from your non-Gmail accounts. To enable this feature, go to the Settings page in your Gmail account and choose Accounts. Under Get Mail From Other Accounts, choose Add Another Mail Account. It’s worth noting that the email account you use here must be a POP (Post Office Protocol) account; most are, but some providers don’t allow POP access by default.

You’ll be asked to provide your account details: your email address, incoming mail server, and password. To begin with, you may choose to leave a copy of retrieved messages on the server. That way, should anything go wrong, you’ll still have your original messages.

After you save your changes here, Gmail will check your mail account, just as you would with your own desktop email client. But now for the vital step: setting up your desktop client to check Gmail instead of your main mail server.

In the Gmail account Settings screen, choose Forwarding And POP/IMAP. Next, under POP Download, choose Enable POP For All Mail, and you can opt to have Gmail keep or delete copies as they are downloaded. Finally, take note of the Configuration Instructions; they are specified for all major email clients, and they will tell you what settings to use to set up your desktop program.

Live Spam-Free

By the time you’re finished, you’ll have virtually spam-free email filling up your desktop client. It’s unfortunate that we have to go to such lengths to deal with the spam in our lives. But with some elbow grease and a bit of ingenuity, you can live a life in ignorance of the horrors that await most email users.

by Aaron Vegh