ANTI SPAM SERVICES

Everyone who regularly uses e-mail for communications is familiar with the problem of unsolicited, unwanted e-mail (spam).setting up the centrally controlled anti spam service only can control the unnamed spam.

The anti-spam system should be used with caution. As with any filtering technology there is a risk of losing wanted e-mail. Please follow the set-up instructions carefully.

How do anti-spam services work?
Remotely hosted email blocking and filtering services are a great way to go as the hard work of configuration and security is taken care of by another company.

Basically what happens is that you give the service access to your mailbox. That way friends, colleagues and clients still write to you at your usual address - the service "plugs in" to your existing email setup. You also continue to send mail via your normal address. The anti spam service then automatically checks your inbox and collects your email and processes it.

Any email from an 'unapproved' address is responded to with an email by the filtering service requesting the person to take further action to allow the email to be received by you. Once the action has been taken, future email from that person is automatically deemed "clean" and will go straight through to you. This is known as "challenge/response" filtering. As most spammers broadcast to tens of thousands of email addresses in each instance, they won't concern themselves with going to the trouble of getting their message to you, whereas valid mail senders will react to a challenge/response setup. 

If you subscribe to a lot of newsletters, all you really need then is a free email account to send these to, or to configure your filtering service to permit emails from selected organizations. A good anti-spam service will also recognize virus emails and stop these dead in their tracks.

To collect your mail, you simply use your standard email program. Only a minor adjustment to your POP3 settings is usually necessary in order to collect your mail. Once set up, which only takes a few minutes, the whole process is seamless from there on in. All you should receive is clean mail, free of spam and viruses.