Using a spam filter on our biz email

Your experience. Do you miss important stuff?

[jsinger]

Just downloaded Eudora 6.0 with its spam filter to use on the massive amount of email our firm gets... some vital, most worthless.

I also wanted to test our outgoing emails to see how they fare in an increasingly filtered environment.

Now I find myself checking the "junk" file all the time to assure that we aren't missing a rare important email. That seems to be more time consuming than deleting the junk by hand as we used to do.

Any comments on using email filters for business? I'm brand new to this.

[sun818]

Brett was saying here 98% of his HTML e-mail is spam: [webmasterworld.com...]

That suggests to me that keeping outgoing e-mail will avoid the spam filters. I also found including many links in your e-mail will trigger some spam filters. With email newsletters, you want to address each customer individually in the To: field. This avoid the filters that delete messages not specifically address to them in To: field.

Also, not publishing your e-mail on the web, or at least make it difficult for it to be harvested will reduce the amount of spam you receive.

Some related threads:
Aggressive Spam Filtering
and lose legitimate business mail?
[webmasterworld.com...]

Best way to stop mailto: robot spidered spam?
[webmasterworld.com...]

[bcolflesh]

Best free option:

spambayes.sourceforge.net/

[andy_boyd]

I use Apple's Mail application which has a built in spam filter. We use it everyday and have no problems with it after 2 years of solid use. If you don't use Apple products you could also try Thunderbird from Mozilla.org which is very capable and getting better with every release.

I couldn't get by without spam filtering nowadays, highly recommended.

[ecommerce man]

Using Spam Assasin at the moment. Works great. The scoring algorithms it uses are fully configurable and to date I've not missed any important mail.

Spam is becoming the bain of everyones email life. I would not be without my spam blocker.

[Philosopher]

I've been using a program called choicemail for the past three months and it has been a life-saver. I haven't missed a single important email since I began using it and only about 3 or 4 spam emails have come through (as opposed to the 1000+ I was getting daily). Takes a little bit of time to set up, but well worth it in my opinion.

[rcjordan]

I'm still using the old beta version of mailwasher (handles multiple accounts) and my own filters. Filtering globally (10 accounts) for a firm dealing in interest rates and mortgages isn't easy, but it can be done. False positives are running about 1% currently, but can be trimmed with another round of tweaking.

[jsinger]

I've now been using Eudora 6.0 for several days. Not impressed. Some important stuff is classed as junk. I'm constantly fishing thru the junk file and in doing so I see more spam than ever!

98% of spam goes right into the junk file. But deleting spam the old way was never a huge problem.

Eudora's filter is supposed to get smarter with time. Will see.

[sun818]

I'm using the free SpamPal. It acts as a proxy between your mail server and your e-mail client. So far so good. Its not 100% accurate - what spam program is - but its the best solution I've found so far. Did I say free? :)