Without realising, many of us are connected to ISPs who have their own server-side anti-spam filters, then wonder why important emails never arrives in our mailbox. We find this scenario with providers such as AOL and end-users receiving important emails from software suppliers. The snag is what they regard as spam may differ widely from what we’d regard as spam. Therefore we’re not particularly keen on server-side anti-spam filtering and you rely on someone else to decide what they regard as spam before you even get the chance to make your own decision.

However, if you have an email address with a generic mailbox (so you can receive email sent to accounting@yourdomain.com, sales@yourdomain.com etc), the problem is that you may receive the same spam message sent through, multiple times. This may start making you feel that you want a server-side filter, so you can avoid having to manually teach your email client what you regard as spam or not. Also, spam messages are becoming even more ingenious, so they easily find new ways of getting around Outlook’s rather basic junk mail filter.

The alternative is an anti-spam service from someone like Cloudmark, who rely on end-users to offer feedback on what they regard as spam or not. Each time you tell your email client that it is a spam message, this info is collected and compared to other feedback. In future, this quickly gets updated and further messages from the same source are then regarded as spam, in future, automatically. You won’t have to manually filter as Cloudmark Desktop will automate this for you.

We’ve included the plugin for Oulook, but there are also versions for Outlook Express and Thunderbird from their website. We’re wondering though, what about Windows Mail that ships with Vista?