My Pick For Best Spam Filter

I’ve used a lot of spam filters — both free and paid — and for the money my recommendation for the best email spam filter would be Cloudmark.

There are basically three types of spam filtering.

1. Blacklist / Keyword filter

This is the oldest and simplest type of spam detection. You set up a list of bad email addresses and / or bad keywords and if the email contains any of them then it gets flagged as spam.

2. Heuristic Detection

Most modern spam detection programs use heuristic algorithms to “learn” patterns as to what is considered to be a spam email.

Over time the program learns about spam and detection rates and accuracy goes up.

3. Group Consensus

Cloudmark uses a unique type of spam detection. It is based upon the notion that other people have probably received the same spam email so the Cloudmark software is in constant contact with a centralized spam database.

It works remarkably well and what I like best about Cloudmark is the very simple interface and that it is relatively lightweight.

Other spam filtering software I’ve used are often very slow and intrusive to the email program. More than one spam filtering program I’ve used actually locked up my Outlook and I had to uninstall the program to get my email working again.

Currently Cloudmark goes for about $40 / year and that allows you to install it on two computers.

You can try out Cloudmark for a 15 day free trial at their website www.cloudmark.com.