Spam, one of the nastier four letter words in our vocabulary. What was once a ‘benign’ (although not cancer related) sandwich meat has evolved into a force to be reckoned with.

Most of us are already using a variety of server-side protection options. And yes, they offer a variety of protective abilities that yield different levels of success. Regardless, unless you are on a larger network with some hardcore filtering in place, spam likely remains a major headache to deal with.

On my Windows box, I use Thunderbird as my email client with Outlook 2k as my PIM of choice. Thunderbird has fair Bayesian filter abilities, but sometimes it is just not enough. I mean, you still have to sort through the mess of mail filtered and to be quite frank - it’s filtering does not hold a candle to that of POPFile of Spambayes.

But even with those last two options being a great way to sort out junk from proper mail, I needed something more. Something that could blacklist and whitelist without a lot of interaction on my part. Something that truly integrated with Thunderbird 1.5.

Enter SpamPal
SpamPal is awesome! Spam sent to my junk folder was cut in half overnight. Here, just take a gander at these features for yourself:

• Tons of DNSBL lists (server sorted blocking lists). These lists are kept very up to date.

• Blacklist by email address or even perform entire netblocks!
• SpamPal supports multiple POP3 servers, It also protects IMAP and SMTP as well.
• Using filters in your mail program, use the spam tagging feature.
• Like browser extentions? How about SpamPal plugins! I use the Bayesian plugin as no program is 100% perfect. It actually sorts pretty well.
• IronPort Systems support. Thanks to the Bonded Sender plugin, you can really lock things down super tight if you like. Perfect for those of us that receive hundreds of emails a day.
• Run this as a Windows service! Yes, this program simply rocks…

Now, I am not stupid enough to stand here (or sit here) and tell you that this is going to solve all of your spam problems or even that this is the best program out there. No, what I am saying is that it’s free, it works and I have found myself becoming a major supporter of the results seen thus far.

I’ve tried the countless other programs and this is the best software that I have found yet; although I am open to near perfect alternatives. For now though, I am very happy with my choice. After all, the price is right. I mean, who can argue with free?

[tags]plugin,spam,pop3,bayesian,filtering,junk mail,imap[/tags]