Solutions for the Spam Problem

By Gerry Morris

Spam drives me nuts. Of the 150 to 200 emails I receive every day on my business email account about half are unsolicited junk. Although I’ve never responded to any of the offers for stock, software, prescription drugs, fantastic wealth, etc., the stuff just keeps coming. Because my email address is posted on such public web sites as my firms webpage and those of the various professional organization of which I’m a member, my email address is low hanging fruit for the various methods used by spammers to harvesting addresses en masse from the web. Consequently, the volume of unwanted email will probably increase.

On my desktop computer I used for some time an anti-spam program called Qurb, now called CA Anti Spam as a result of a recent acquisition of the company. The product can still be found at www.qurb.com. Qurb intercepts spam as it is downloaded from your mail server by Outlook and sends it to a separate mail folder. It identifies legitimate mail initially by searching your mail folders upon installation and putting all the email you’ve saved on the “Allowed” list to be let through to your inbox. When new mail arrives that is not on the Allowed list or otherwise meets the programs criterion for spam, it diverts the mail to the spam folder. The program notifies you periodically that spam has arrived so that you can check the folder to see if legitimate mail has been diverted. If so, you can click a checkmark beside the mail item or click a button on the menu bar and add the mail’s address to the Allowed list. If unwanted mail makes it to the inbox you can similarly click a button to add its address to the “Blocked” list.

Qurb works extremely well and is highly rated by those organizations that monitor such products. However, Qurb, nor any other PC based spam blocker couldn’t cure the most annoying problem that spam causes for me. I use my Treo 650 when I’m out of the office to retrieve and occasionally send email. Until recently my Treo was configured to download my email directly from my incoming mail server. This means that all the mail on the server, spam included was downloaded. While the Treo mail client works well it is fairly slow. The volume of email I was downloading was beginning to take 10 minutes or so. Although the newer models of the Treo when using the next generation web access networks are much faster, Downloading a hundred emails at a time, which I regularly do if I haven’t check my mail in a while, just takes an annoying amount of time.

Recently, I’ve discovered a solution. A company called Only My Email offers a web based spam filter that captures spam before it gets to your desktop. The web site for the service is www.onlymyemail.com. It offers two classes of services: personal and corporate. The personal service costs $4.00 per month and handles email addresses receiving up to 400 emails per day. Basically, the service maintains its own mail servers. Their server download your email from your incoming mail server, filters spam and then makes the remaining mail available for download by your mail client. After signing up for the service and configuring it to contact your mail server, you must reconfigure your mail client to retrieve mail from the Only My Email POP servers. All this is easy to do.

Because the filtering is done before the email reaches your desktop, the unwanted mail stays on the server. Only My Email sends you an email every evening listing the blocked mail so if the service has blocked something you want to go through you can simply click a link, resend the mail, and add the address to the “Always allow list.” If spam gets through there are a couple of easy to use options available to add the address or mail type to the “Never allow list.” The program can be configured to place a link at the bottom of incoming email to click to notify the service that a particular unfiltered item is spam and should be blocked. You can also go to the service’s website and add an address to the “Never allow list.” You can also check the list of blocked mail at anytime on the web site. The service has a web mail component so you can check you email and send outgoing messages from a web browser.

The corporate version routes your email to its servers first where the filtering occurs. The mail is then sent to your mail server. There is no limit for how many emails the corporate service will handle on a daily basis. Prices for this service are quoted on a per account basis but the minimum charge is $30 per month for up to 20 email addresses. This service can be used even where your incoming email server is operated by your ISP if the incoming mail server meets certain configuration criterion. This information is listed on the Only My Email website. It’s too technical for me to decipher. If you are interested I suggest you contact your ISP who probably speaks whatever language the information is written in.

The personal version works extremely well and should be fine for most users. I pay close attention to the daily blocked email reports to make sure that I don’t miss an important email. I would suggest manually adding to the Always allow list the email addresses that you most frequently receive messages from. For instance, I’ve added all the addresses associated with my firm. The spam blocking is somewhat content based so even one email sent to me by my legal assistant was blocked before I added her address to the Always allowed list. The email contained some medical terms associated with one of my cases that must have made it read like an add from an online pharmacy.

E. G. “Gerry” Morris is a solo practitioner and has practiced law for over 27 years in Austin, Texas. He is certified as a Criminal Law Specialist by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization. His firm web site is at www.egmlaw.com. Email your comments and questions to Gerry at tech@egmlaw.com.