Webmail clients like Gmail, YahooMail etc. have some of the best-in-industry Spam Filters and protect you fairly well from all sort of spam. But if you prefer to use Desktop Email Clients like Outlook 2000/XP/2003/Express, Eudora, Mozilla Thunderbird, IncrediMail, Pegasus Mail, Phoenix Mail etc., then your choices are very limited.
Off-course, you may use features like “Rules” in Outlook, to filter out some of the spam in your email client, but the this method of spam protection is not very effective in this era, when the spammers are constantly changing their spamming tactics with each passing day.
Spamihilator is a neat freeware application that runs in the background and capable of filtering most of the spam messages trying to reach your inbox. It has some nice built in filter, working on different algorithms, which tend to perform better and better and learn as per your preferences.
Some of the basic filters that are used in Spamihilator are following:
Learning Filter: This is the most important spam filter of Spamihilator, which recognizes more than 98% of all incoming spam mails. The best part is that it also has a Training Area, to increase the recognition rate continuously.
Spam-Word-Filter: It constantly keeps on looking for some of the most used words for spamming and decides the fate of the incoming message based on that.
Link Filter: It keeps on searching incoming messages for links to spam websites.
Besides these, Spamihilator includes a huge list (about 40) of plugins, which you can download and integrate with the basic Spamihilator package, to increase its effectiveness and add more features. Some of the important and most used plugins are as follows.
DCC-Filter: DCC Filter sends a secure checksum of every incoming mail to the network and receives the number of users who also sent the same checksum. Because of that, it is able to recognize unsolicited bulk mail.
POP3Notifier: It frequently checks your e-mail accounts for new messages and shows a small notification
Attachment Filter: It marks an email as spam if it has an attachment who’s file type is in the blocked list.
Despite all these good features, I suggest that with the installation of Spamihilator in your system, you should keep on looking if any non-spam message has landed in the inbox of Spamihilator my mistake. You can easily mark it non-spam and it will make Spamihilator more effective in future.
After all, everybody can commit mistakes, but it is important to learn from your mistakes. The best part is that Spamihilator becomes more and more effective in reducing spam as you go on using it.
[This is a guest post by Silki Garg. She advises on how to eliminate spyware, online threats and malware detection, on her Internet Security Blog. A visit to her Blog is highly recommended. You’re sure to find something of interest.]
Did you enjoy this article? Please subscribe to RSS Feed to receive all the updates!
