Spam is one of the great inconveniences of modern life – every day you have to carefully sift out unwanted (and likely offensive) emails from business communications, in order to get your job done. There is then an added level of risk should you open a message containing a virus or accidentally discard important messages along with the garbage. All this means that an anti-spam filter is essential for anybody using email for business.

What qualifications separate a good program from one that is only average? There are a number of factors that have to be looked at in order to narrow down the list of candidates.

1). It has to be able to work by itself, checking each packet header of incoming emails, and deleting those that are inappropriate.

2). It has to kill these spam emails before they reach a user’s inbox. This saves on bandwidth, and reduces the need to sort out the important stuff from the junk.

3). It must be able to effectively analyze both sides of the firewall, checking each part of the message, including the header, body and source. A list of addresses, that is easy to adjust by the administrator of the system, is also of great help in filtering spam out. A Bayesian filter is an important feature for a good anti-spam application.

4). A good program will be able to let a user preview any of the emails that have been marked as spam. Sometimes emails are miss labeled for a variety of reasons and these may need to be retrieved on some occasions.

The spam utility should also allow for flexible filtering and a separate folder should be available for spam emails. The software should also allow a user to recover an accidentally deleted email.

Generally speaking, this type of program has to be able to work by itself, be easy to use and have the best filters, able to be easily adjusted by any user. There are many great options, but three top choices include SpamFighter, ChoiceMail, and SpamEater Pro. By making the right choices you can save yourself a considerable amount of time every day.

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