MailShield Desktop

Spam was a real problem for my wife and I. You see, like many people, we were getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of junk email. At the peak, between the two of us we were receiving over 1,000 emails per day, and more than 70% were spam. Useless messages which were of no value to us, yet required time to read, time to delete and a certain amount of aggravation.

At first I had the thought "who cares, just hit the delete key". What's so hard about that, after all? Just delete the silly messages that are not desired. It seemed like just a minor annoyance.

However, it was bothersome and sometimes alarming. Especially as the spam increased and we started receiving spam of a different nature. advertisements for hardcore bondage, for example, rape and illegal software, strange herbs and various "enhancement" packages that were unneeded and unwanted.

As the volume increased, we decided enough was enough. It was time to do something to protect ourselves from this scourge and prevent it from reaching us entirely. While it's true that the "simply hit the delete key" method works when you are receiving a few emails per day, it becomes very ineffective when the number reaches into the hundreds.

In order to solve this problem I was required to examine dozens of different programs, each with it's own set of features, advantages and disadvantages. After much research, I decided on combining several methods, as each catches some spam, but no method was perfect.

One program that proved itself very useful right away is called "MailShield Desktop".  This is a typical content checking anti-spam solution (similar to Spam Killer and any number of other products on the market). What it does is use a series of rules which it compares against each and every email in an inbox. Each rule has a score which is added to a total. When a threshold is reached, the message is considered spam and removed from the inbox. It is placed on a special screen where it can be examined later, if desired, and resent if it happens that the message is not really spam.

This, a message might contain an 800 number but still be considered valid. It might also contain a sexual word and be fine. But when it also is from a special domain, it will be marked as spam and removed from the inbox.

What I liked about MailShield Desktop is the fact that it's highly configurable.  I was able to define very specific rules to pinpoint spam very precisely. In addition, several powerful whitelist functions allowed me to define criteria for email messages which are most definitely NOT spam. This helps prevent false positives, which makes it more likely that messages identified as spam are actually spam.

It took a lot of work to tune MailShield Desktop to do what I wanted. The program now catches about 75% of the spam that we receive, and there only seem to be one or two false positives per day (out of 500 email messages that's not bad). Add to that two other spam solutions (Spam Filter and SpamNet) and we've reduced our spam to less than 1%.