Today is

By: Ikedi Ani-okoye.

Spam blockers

Do spam blockers work? Even though it is estimated that 90 billion spam emails are sent worldwide every day the use of spam filters is still questioned.

The term spam blocker can also be known as anti-spam software. This piece of software analysis's your incoming email and uses a number of rules to decide whether the mail that you are receiving is legitimate email or not. So in answer to whether spam blockers work or not the answer is yes.

Spam blocker protection

Other than using free email accounts, there are also junk emails filtering software that can filter the bulk emails from coming to your inbox. I used PopTray to do this. It will check your POP email accounts for every 5 minutes.

PopTray can also check the raw body for every emails that you've received. This will also prevent you from clicking any links in a phishing email because you can see where the links pointed to. It also has rules feature where you can set the rules for spam emails and it will filter it for you.

Anti-spam software

Anti-spam software is installed in your machine to divert the spam coming in. If installed in the mail server, you will never receive the spam, to begin with. The blocker is configured based on a number of criteria.

These could be specific words in the subject line, in the body of the message, and the type of attachments accompanying the mail. You could arrange to filter out even the sender's email address. Certain Internet Service Providers (ISPs) maintain a blacklist of habitual spam senders - known as spammers. Anti-spam software detects these blacklisted senders and rejects them per se.

CONCLUSION

No email application doesn't have a spam problem and there is a spam blocker out there that will suit everybody. It doesn't matter if you're tied to a desk or travelling the world you can still block spam effectively and quite easily. For those of you on a tight budget there are also plenty of free spam blockers that you can download for personal use.