Recently, I was over come with spam.  Maybe overcome is putting it lightly.  I was getting more spam email in my inbox than I was actual email.  Which for reasons that are far too obvious is a horrible thing.  Thankfully I found a fix.

I had fired off an email not too terribly long ago to photographer Zack Arias.  While I have never met the guy personally, it doesn’t take much time in reading his blog that he is a helpful type of dude.  There is not much the guy holds back.  Naturally, his email account must get pounded on a daily basis from both spam and legit emails.  I got an auto reply message about the spam part and was asked to verify who I was.  Having received more spam that I would like, I totally understood and even hung on to that email so that I could digest it later.

At home, for the main email account I use, I am primarily checking it using Outlook on the PC.  For the past year I have been using two anti-spam measures to stop spam.  The first was the “Spam Assassin” application that is a part of my web hosting package.  The other was Cloudmark. Cloudmark was a client level application that integrated with Outlook and did a wonderful job.  It performed far better than Spam Assassin, which let a lot of junk through to me.  The trouble was that Cloudmark only ran on my machine and not at the server level.  While I see that they do offer server level options, none of those were options that I could implement given my hosting setup.  So what happened was all of the spam that Cloudmark would normally block got delivered to my phone but blocked when I got home to check my email using Outlook.  It got so bad that in the mornings I would wake up and check my email at home before even turning on my phone to stop the junk from getting through.

Recently we welcomed daughter number 2 into the world and during that time my Cloudmark subscription had expired.  In just 3 days I had 200 emails waiting on me, most of which were spam.  I signed up for the free trial at Spam Arrrest and it only took one day before I signed up for the year.  I was able to export my contacts from Outlook and import them into Spam Arrest, which means those I normally communicate with did not have to know what was going on.  I changed the server information that is used to send and receive email so that everything goes through Spam Arrest.  As a test, I opened the spam queue in Spam Assassin and let about 20 or so messages go through.  Spam Arrest has caught every single one.  As a matter of fact, it has caught everything.

You get access to your options and controls much like any regular web mail application would.  You can see your inbox and access all of the messages caught by their filters.  The great thing is being able to delete all that crap at once, or allow Spam Arrest to do it own its own.  I believe right now mine deletes every 7 days.  So the controls and features are nice and the price is dirt cheap.  It is under $30 a year, which is well worth it in my opinion.

So what does that mean?  Well, I spend less time deleting emails meaning I can focus on other more important things.  My battery on my phone actually lasts longer because instead of vibrating every time it checks mail that is spam, the only stuff that gets through is legit messages, so it uses less energy.  More importantly, all the crap that normally gets through gets stopped.

Try it for yourself!