Spam Monitor
Spam Monitor will eliminate unwanted messages from your Inbox. It's an easy to use spam killer that sits between your mail server and your mail program. Spam Monitor uses industry-proven technologies like Bayesian filtering and blacklist servers to reliably and accurately identify unwanted emails. But Spam Monitor is safe, because it never deletes an email. Spam messages are tagged in the subject header, allowing you to deal with them in whichever way you want.
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Spam Monitor runs as an icon in your system tray. It requires your email program to be reconfigured so that Spam Monitor connects to your mail server, and your mail program connects to Spam Monitor. Don't worry: Spam Monitor's configuration wizard can make the necessary changes to most popular mail programs automatically.
In everyday use, Spam Monitor is almost transparent. When you download your mail, Spam Monitor connects to your mail server and checks each message before passing it on to your mail program. The only difference you'll see is that downloading mail takes a bit longer, and mail which Spam Monitor thinks is spam will have a tag added to the message subject.
However, making it work well takes a bit of effort on your part. You need to train Spam Monitor to distinguish spam from wanted mail, and you must create a rule in your mail program that either deletes mail marked with the ** SPAM ** tag, or moves it to a special folder and marks it as read.
How it works
Spam Monitor uses a combination of industry-proven technologies to decide whether or not a message is spam. You can add addresses to a blacklist - messages from these addresses will always be classed as spam. You can also add addresses to a whitelist - messages from these addresses will never be classed as spam. The whitelist is very important. Deciding whether or not a message is spam is not an exact science. The whitelist ensures that mail from friends or colleagues never get tagged as spam. Spam Monitor can automatically update the whitelist with the addresses of your regular correspondents.
Spam Monitor uses public blacklists (DNSBLs) to identify known sources of spam. These are public servers, accessible via the Internet, that can be interrogated to find out whether the server from which an email was sent is a known source of spam. This is a simple and effective way of identifying spam, but it will not detect spam that comes from previously unknown sources.
Spam Monitor can block mail from specific countries. This can be a useful tool for eliminating spam. For example, a lot of spam originates from servers in China, so if there is no legitimate reason for you to receive email from China, you can block it by ticking a check box.
The other major tool in Spam Monitor's anti-spam armoury is Bayesian filtering. This is essentially a statistical analysis of the content of mail messages, which results in a probability that a message is, or is not, spam. Bayesian filtering can be an effective way of detecting spam that comes from unknown sources, and it is widely used in modern anti-spam products. But Bayesian filters do not work "out of the box". They need to be trained to distinguish spam from mail that is wanted.
Spam Monitor comes with a pre-configured Bayesian database, but on first install it tends to result in a lot of wanted mail being classed as spam. The program documentation does not make it clear that you need to train the database to get good results. First, you must move your spam messages into a separate folder from your wanted mail. You can then run the wizard on the contents of one of these folders to train it to recognize what is spam and what isn't. The more times you do this (and hence the bigger the sample of messages the wizard sees) the better it gets, so you do need a bit of patience before Spam Monitor will accurately distinguish between wanted and unwanted email.
You might consider it annoying to have to download spam into your mail program at all, and then create a mail rule to get rid of it. Can't Spam Monitor simply delete the unwanted stuff? Unfortunately, no anti-spam tool can distinguish spam from wanted mail with 100% accuracy, so deleting it is not a good idea. After Spam Monitor has been trained and is working well, all you need to do is empty your spam folder once in a while. But it's important to retain the messages that have been marked as spam, so that you can search through them if an email you're expecting fails to appear in your Inbox.
Spam Monitor is a well-implemented and easy to use anti-spam tool that uses tried and tested technologies. Try it now, and eliminate spam from your Inbox for good!
