How to Easily Get Rid of E-Mail Spam

Picture this scenario. You rush to your computer, hoping to find e-mail from friends or family members, orders from clients, or questions about your products and services.

You download 52 pieces of e-mail. Wow! Except there's one small problem. 49 pieces of that e-mail is useless spam.

What is spam? Spam is e-mail that you haven't given permission to receive or don't want to receive.

For example, let's say that you buy a SonyT camera, and you sign up for their free newsletter. You've give SonyT permission to send you that newsletter, so it's not spam.

Instead, spam is when someone steals your e-mail address from a message board or list, and then sends thousands of e-mail out advertising a product. You didn't ask for that e-mail to be sent to you, so it's doing nothing but taking up room in your e-mail box and time when you have to sort through and delete it.

I recently heard of the neatest e-mail client that helps to combat spam, MailWasher. http://www.mailwasher.net/

When you first log on to the Net, you start MailWasher, which downloads the subject lines of your e-mail. You can tell the program to run your e-mail through the black list of e-mail spammers to detect which e-mail is legitimate and which isn't.

Then, it categorizes your e-mail, putting it into areas such as "friends," "normal," "possible spam," and "black list."

If MailWasher thinks that a piece of e-mail might be spam, it also marks it for "bouncing," which is one of the coolest features of all. Instead of just deleting the e-mail from your server, it bounces it back to the spammer, who (we hope) will eventually remove your e-mail address from their list.

After MailWasher has finished categorizing your e-mail, you look through the list. If the e-mail is from someone you know, you mark it as a "friend," and the program will add it to your "friends'" list. If the e-mail is spam, you can add it to your black list of spammers.

After you've chosen what to do with the e-mail, you hit the "Process Mail" button, and MailWasher begins bouncing back the spam to the original owners and deleting it from your server.

After MailWasher processes the spam e-mail, it automatically opens your e-mail software program where you can actually download the remaining e-mail into your program-only the mail that you really want and need to see.

The more you use the program, the more you "train" it to recognize friends and spammers, so it categorizes e-mail even more efficiently.

I've found few programs that are this handy, helpful, and easy to use. And, the cost is right: free to try! It's a shareware program, and the creator asks that you pay him a fee if you like and use it. How much you pay him is up to you. http://www.mailwasher.net/

About the Author

This article was written by Robin Nobles, a professional freelance writer and the Director of Training at the Academy of Web Specialists academywebspecialists.com. Over the past few years, she has trained several thousand people in her online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies and has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon. Visit the Academy's training Web site to learn more about their online courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.

RobinN@acws.com
http://www.academywebspecialists.com