An important part of your computers defense is a spam blocker (also known as a spam filter). These filters prevent malicious code that is made by virus writers from being transferred onto your computer. Without a proper spam blocker viruses can be used to control a victims computer. To defend against this danger a blocker must be installed.

Spam blockers can be purchased from vendors world wide in either retails store or online. There are many spam blockers that can be downloaded for free from various sites. The most reliable spam blockers usually come with an annual cost but the benefits of having one outweigh the cost.

Filters are programmed with specific jobs to identify spam. I will briefly explain some of the some of the basic features that a filter uses to weed out spam:

Supplied rules and signatures: This is a list of well known list of spamming patterns that is used to identify spam messages.

Filtering policies for enterprises: These are custom made configurations that are made for a specific companies needs.

User preferences: These are the settings that the individual creates once the software is installed on the computer. These setting are focused on types of spam that annoys the user. This also controls how the software will function of the costumer’s computer.

Pre defined blacklists: Another list of the widely known untrusted web addresses. These sites are be default blocked from access. If the user wishes to bypass this setting he must add them to his whitelist.

The last feature is a Quarantine list: This is a place where all messages are stored for the user to manually check. In the case of an accidental block, the user can still retrieve the message.

Once a message has been deemed as spam. It will usually be deleted instantly or within a set period of days.

With this information you should have a general idea of how spam blockers function and defend computers from daily spam.

Will a spam filter help you free up time? I spend so much time weeding the spam out of my mailbox that it is unbelievable, or at least I did. It is an unfortunate fact that a good spam blocker is an absolute necessity with any computer that has email and internet access to it. Spam is simply unsolicited email that is usually a part of some sort of commercial advertising strategy. It is the email equivalent of junk mail and has been a part of email life for years now. You should really consider a good spam blocker because the truth is that spam presents a great deal more trouble than just the pain of weding out advertisements.

So why is spam such a problem? I mean do you really have to get a spam blocker? The answer is yes because spam eats up the electronic resources on your computer like memory and storage. Spam may also have viruses that can shut down your computer or your network if you have one. It can also contain scams that can trick some of the less savvy users of the internet and email. What a good spam blocker will do is stop the messages before they ever hit your inbox, thus saving you space, memory, and the threat of unsavory offers.

Another way a spam blocker will help you is in terms of your time. Even if the spam you receive does not contain viruses and really is just a series of advertisements, it takes a lot of time to delete and filter out all the spam in your inbox. If the email in question is one you use for work, then think how much more productive you can be with a spam blocker keeping you from having to read and delete a bunch of advertisements.

If you are a business owner, the same applies. Your employees will be much more productive if you get a good spam blocker put in with the email. It will save time in reading bad emails as well as help protect you from the threat of viruses or spyware. Spam is a problem and can really hold back a business as much as it can an individual, so give some consideration to getting a good spam blocker so that you can save your business time and money.

Spam has been around pretty much since the internet and email first became popular. It is difficult to define and recognize, but laws are still passed to help slow it down or stop it. The problem is that often times the spammers are ignoring such laws and sending their messages out anyway. All this means is that no matter how many laws or acts are passed, a good spam blocker is a necessity to keep your computer and to keep your email running smoothly. In addition, it will save you time and frustration every time you log on to check your email messages.

Estimates show that the average business email user receives over 5,000 pieces of spam every year. Each piece of spam that makes its way into an employee’s inbox results in wasted time and computer resources. The best way to protect your business from spam is to invest in a sophisticated, intelligent spam blocker. Implementation of an effective spam blocker should be one of the top technology concerns of any new business.

An effective spam blocker searches incoming emails and filters out unsolicited advertising and emails with executable attachments. To reduce the incidence of legitimate emails erroneously being tagged as spam, filtering should be based on criteria you determine, as well as on context-sensitive threat detection and reputation filtering. By reviewing the reputation of the sender, and examining the contents of incoming emails, more than 80% of spam is blocked before ever reaching your network. The time, productivity, bandwidth, and system resources saved as a result of this reduction in spam are tremendous.

Why does so much spam get generated? The simple reason is that spam is effective. There are two main types of spam emails: each with a different purpose. The most common is the sales email, which is very similar to receiving a flyer in the mail or a brochure tucked under your windshield wiper at a mall parking lot. It is a form of mass advertising that spammers carefully design to slip past your spam blocker.

The benefit of this marketing strategy is that it enables spammers to fine-tune their message and target audience based on email harvesting location. For example, if you sign up for an online newsletter about investments you may find your inbox filled with hot stock tips and dubious investment advice. If you visit an adult website and register your email address, you are likely to receive massive amounts of porn or other sexually related spam. Although the vast majority of recipients have no interest in the contents of these spam emails, a spammer needs the campaign to be effective only .00001 percent of the time.

The second type of spam is also the most dangerous. Increasing numbers of spam emails contain viruses, and are sent with the sole purpose of delivering a damaging executable program to your computer. These malicious emails can result in stolen or corrupted data, identity theft, and considerable downtime for your business. More sophisticated types of viruses will even infect your system and then replicate, sending themselves to all of your email contacts or irreparably damaging the contents of your hard drive.

The best spam blocker for your business is one that is able to intercept unsolicited emails, while allowing legitimate emails to pass through the filter. Losing legitimate emails to an inferior spam blocker can result in missed communications, loss of sales, and client distrust. An effective, intelligent spam blocker will increase the productivity of your employees, while protecting your sensitive data, client information, and identity from harm.

Stanford Wallace and the company called Cyber Promotions were placed in a state of bankruptcy for their spamming activities in 1998. Laurence Carter, a famous attorney who used spam as a form of advertising was disbarred in 1997 for his use of UBE’s to advertise his immigration law expertise. Jason Smathers, a man who used to work for AOL, sold about 90 million email contacts of AOL subscribers in the United States of America for an undisclosed sum and was found out.

These lists were sold to spammers and subsequently used in their activities. Jason Smathers was then arrested and served hard time. There have been cases in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and even parts of Asia where spam has made their mark. This is why you need spam blocker software, because of the fact that I can list down the times in which the perpetrators of spam were brought to justice. What you need to do to ensure that spam does not see the light of your inbox day is to install a spam blocker software – but you need to choose the correct one.

A good spam blocker software is unobtrusive and operates without you knowing it. There are a lot of spam blocker software out there who do no more than just add another level of red tape that directly involves you and wastes your time even more. You do not want to be in a position where you have to be prompted every 5 to ten minutes about some email that advertises genital enlargements. A spam blocker software must be able to identify the keywords and the popular companies and sorts of products that appear frequently in spam emails. They also have to be able to identify rogue and alien network intrusions in your messaging software, which means people who try to message from randomly generated email addresses – the sort of random emails that worms and Trojans are programmes to generate that can go through traditional and built in client side spam filters. Spam software should be able to discern the difference between a bot and a real human being behind a message. There are many spam blocker software out there, from the simplistic to the intricate and you need to strike a balance when you are choosing one. Also you have to identify how much spam can affect what you do.

Sometimes if you have a business whose critical core competencies depend highly on digital communications, then you might have to look an industrial sized software which has a whole host of security features you can use. If you are just a casual user of email or instant messengers, you can just pick and choose some of the more simpler software solutions that are available online. IN the end of the day, everyone is affected by spam, which means that spam blocker software would be needed. Nobody wants to have their time and effort wasted combing through lists and closing popups. You have been handed the tools, use them.

Every employer is at least partially aware that their employees use company computers to do personal things, regardless of whether there is a written company policy on appropriate Internet usage. Spam blockers can be a great corporate asset in reducing the amount of damage done by employee carelessness.

Employee computer misuse can result in rendering the company server vulnerable to incoming spam and malware. An effective spam blocker can prevent this type of business risk. A quality spam blocker can detect emails that contain certain words or language, such as pornographic terms or profanity. It can also compare an incoming email to the IPs of known spammers in order to determine whether the email is legitimate.

Another important function of a spam blocker is to provide companies with an overview of incoming spam by employee. If the spam blocker indicates that 80% of the spam emails intercepted were sent to one particular employee, that information can be used to determine that the individual employee is not following corporate computer policies. This allows the employer to follow up and take action before the server is at risk.

A recent Vault.com survey revealed that 90.3% of employees polled said that they surf the web at work. The Computer Security Institute and the FBI surveyed companies and found that 78% of those surveyed reported employee Internet abuse, mostly from downloading pornography and the inappropriate use of email. This occurred whether the company had employed a spam blocker or not.

The largest danger of employees using corporate email and Internet for personal use is the unintentional harvesting of employees’ company email addresses. For example, an employee may want to receive emails from a news website while at work, and therefore provide the news site with their company email address. The address may be harvested by spammers and the corporate server could be deluged with spam. The more spam an employee receives, the higher likelihood that he or she will eventually click on malware and infect the corporate intranet.

Additionally, some spammers engage in “dictionary spamming” where, once the spammer has harvested a legitimate employee address, it will send spam messages to common names using the same naming protocol in the hopes that someone with that name works there. Dealing with this type of spam takes up significant server resources and time.

Although it is important to have clearly defined and communicated computer use policies, a company’s best defense against ever-increasing spam is an effective spam blocker.