Anyone who has had an email address for more than a week finds themselves squarely in the sites of spammers. I am usually a loving and tolerant man, but when it comes to spammers the image comes to mind of a person buried neck deep next to an anthill and covered with honey.
They (spammers) seem to fall into three categories:
1. Those who want me to help them to sneak millions of dollars out of Africa. Let's think about this for a minute, they could deal with honest professionals (accountants, and attorneys) to move their money, or go to a complete stranger. Ya, that makes perfect sense, sign me up!
2. Porn. Please, like porn is soooo hard to find on the internet that you have to fill my inbox with it. And I like it even more when you send it to my daughters. Keep up the good work.
3. Viagra. You would think that every man in America was impotent, and that married people actually have sex.
Anyway, my point was not to rage on, but to give you a couple tools to keep these leaches from our inbox.
The first tool is for those who use Outlook, it's called SpamBayes and works incredibly well. You can get it for free, it's really easy to setup, and you can download it here.
If you use Outlook Express you need to stop, friends don't let friends use Outlook Express. Two big negatives about OE is that you can't backup your address book and mail boxes without buying a third party program, and you can't control spam without buying yet another program.
You should move over to Thunderbird.
Thunderbird is a wonderful email program, you can easily backup all your mailboxes, it has powerful anti-spam capabilities as part of the program, and most important, very secure!
You can also find a ton of templates and themes that allow you to customize it to your liking.
If you use OE and install Thunderbird, it will import all your settings, address books and mail folders for you. You'll be up and running a snap.
You can download Thunderbird here.
So once you are done transferring those millions of dollars, looking at porn, and popping Viagra, grab one of these free options for taking back control of your inbox!
(caught spammers - click to enlarge)
