Prevent spam from reaching your inbox

Q I am receiving a lot of unsolicited email and I want to get rid of it. Do you have any advice on preventing spam?

Joan Ashworth

A One of the problems with spammers is that once they have you on their list, they never stop sending unsolicited mail to you. Therefore, it’s hard to prevent spam arriving, but you can use filtering software that automatically moves junk email to a separate folder.

The software works by looking for signs that a message is spam, such as words used in the subject line and body of the email, and where the spam has come from.

If you are using either Google Mail or Hotmail, the spam filters are built into the service and usually work quite well. However, if you use email software on your PC, with an email address provided to you by your ISP, you can install extra filtering software to run alongside your normal email client.

One example is Agnitum Spam Terrier. This software installs a toolbar into Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Mail, that helps keep spam messages out of your main inbox. It aims to remove real spam, while avoiding false positives (when spam filters mark a genuine email as spam).

The program creates two new email folders: Spam and Probable Spam, for messages that may be unsolicited. You can view information about spam keywords present in any emails and use them to train the application.

You can mark individual messages as spam, which blocks the sender, or not spam, which helps the program create better rules for what to accept or reject in the future. Keeping your address book up to date with the email addresses of your trusted contacts is another way to improve spam filter performance.

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