As you might imagine, being that we are a pretty public website, we have a huge issue with SPAM. Just to give you an idea, after employing some settings and server-level filtering on my mail server, I am still downloading at least 3,000+ email messages every day, and a huge portion of that is SPAM. I would lose a LOt of production time if I had to manually delete each message from my in-box. I had tried creating my own filters in Outlook, but its a lot of work. I had tried Norton AntiSpam, but found that it crashed after a few days of solid performance. In searching for another solution, I found SafetyBar, by Cloudmark. The utility integrates with Outlook, and it works by connecting all SafetyBar users into a single spam-fighting network, with all users helping to train the system into what is and is not spam. As a user, you participate in training the community on what is spam, and you get scored as to your accuracy. But, besides this, it is just plain accurate. Very rarely do I ever have to go into Delete Items to find a legit message.

This is a subscriber service, and I pay only $3.99 per month for it. More than worth it for me. Unfortunatley, the program only works with Outlook or Outlook Express, so you Eudora or Thunderbird users can’t use it yet. For more info, go to Cloudmark.