Community Newsletter: Q&A: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam

good ideas....here's another

In reply to: 1/07/05 Winning the war on spam by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

The day I turned 18 years old, my MSN e-mail box began getting deluged with spam, nearly half of which was porn. That was enough for me to know that it would be no use trying to "unsubscribe". Hotmail's Bulk Mail filters were of little use, because the only way to keep the junk out of my Inbox was to set it on Exclusive, meaning any message from someone not in my Address Book would be placed in Bulk Mail. The problem here was that every day, I had to wade through all that crap anyway, looking to see if I had received a message from someone that I didn't already have in my Address Book. So that kind of defeated the point, since I had to deal with all the junk anyway.
Then one day, I discovered Mailblocks.com.
Their way of dealing with spam is truly unique. Unlike every other anti-spam service/software, Mailblocks doesn't bother trying to determine what is spam based on the e-mail message itself. Instead, any message that is from someone not in your Address Book is automatically blocksed, and placed in a "Pending" folder (pending approval). Now this sounds like most of the others, but Mailblocks goes a step further.
They use what they call their "Challenge/Response" protocol. All messages from unknown senders are blocked, placed in the Pending folder, and a "Challenge" message is sent to the sender. It basically asks them to click a link, and enter some alpha-numeric character from an image, to prove they are a real person, not some spamming somputer. Once the sender (if it's a real person) completes the "Challenge", the message is moved to your Inbox.
What about automated mailing lists? (like CNet newsletters ) Mailblocks allows for that too! It provides you with what it calls "Trackers". These are basically disposable e-mail addresses under your main address. They are unfiltered, so your automated mailing lists won't get deleted. And if one of your Trackers gets "captured" by spammers, you can just delete it, create a new one, and sign up for the lists you want again, without losing your main address.

Now here's the real beauty of Mailblocks: you don't have to switch e-mail addresses! Mailblocks can monitor up to 3 external e-mail address, filtering spam, and consolidating the mail into your Mailblocks Inbox.
OK. I'll stop advertising now You can get the rest of the details, including pricing, from their website (www.mailblocks.com). Let me just close by saying that I've been using Mailblocks for almost 3 years, and I've never gotten a single unwanted e-mail in my Inbox, and I've never missed a real message.