This wouldn’t be so bad if you only had to do it once, but every now and then, the program would somehow become corrupt or just stop working. Maybe I missed an upgrade or something, I don’t know. But eventually I got tired of having to re-install and re-setup the software, so I went back to the usual “delete, delete, delete†routine of filtering my email manually.
In September 2005 I happened across a program called SPAMfighter. It only works with Outlook and Outlook Express, and I had recently migrated back to Outlook Express from Mozilla Thunderbird, so I decided to give it a try. I don’t remember why I decided to try it, usually anti-spam programs are more trouble than they’re are worth to setup and to use. But for whatever reason, I gave this one a try. It was free for a month, and even after that, it’s free, but they put a little ad in every outgoing email.
The cool thing about SPAMfighter is, it works without you having to do anything. Regardless of how many email accounts you have setup, it automatically filters them somehow and puts the crap in a special SPAMfighter folder. Every now and then you need to check the folder to make sure it didn’t accidentally put something in the folder that you wanted to receive. If there’s nothing in the folder you want to keep, click “Empy Spam Folder†and all of the emails in it go into your deleted folder.
When I first installed SPAMfighter, I had to close Outlook Express and re-start my machine. I think I got distracted or something and forgot that I had installed it. Maybe a day or so went by. Then all of a sudden it dawned on me that I wasn’t getting much spam. Hardly any in fact. That’s when I remember I had installed SPAMfighter and went looking for the folder, which had a nice little collection of spam emails in it, ready for me to delete. Cool!
Like all software programs, SPAMfighter has its problems. It does a good job of detecting spam and putting it into the folder, but it falls down sometimes when you tell it to “Block†an email. This is what you do if an email makes it into your Inbox that you don’t want, and you want to block future emails from that person—you click the “Block†button at the top of your OE screen. More often than not, the email you want to block remains in your mailbox, but another email in your inbox will end up in the SPAMfighter folder. So you have to go to the folder and “Unblock†the one it accidentally put in there, then delete the one you wanted to block in the first place. A little annoying, and hopefully they’ll fix this one day.
Also every now and then the SPAMfighter buttons at the top of the screen get grayed out and you can’t use them. Don’t know why this happens either, usually at this point I’ll just close down Outlook Express and restart. In all fairness, I’m a “heavy-duty†PC user, with many programs running on my desktop, so it’s not uncommon for me to have to re-boot my system for a fresh start.
Anyway, I’ve been using SPAMfighter for 4 or 5 months now and I like it better than anything I’ve tried. After my free trial expired, I paid to Upgrade to the Pro version (about $30 for a year) so I could keep using it without having an ad appear in my outgoing email. I consider that to be money well spent.
