Why would that have an affect? I'm on ADSL here. Does your provider run Spamassassin or something? Mine does but it doesn't take out much. I can tweak it to catch more but I'm concerned about false positives. I also have spampal and Thunderbird junk filter running locally but it's really time for a new address now.

You can point your domain (MX, CNAME, possibly PTR) records at hotmail and yahoo if you register your intent with them first. Not sure about initial/interim/long-term pop3 access to your domain if you host with them though.

Alternatively, you might want to preview your email with an email aid like MailWasher. This allows you to protect yourself, but is really good for when you are on the road with dial-up - you can preview and reply to messages without having them invade your email client of choice.

Some email clients have similar preview/precount capability.

Then there is the personal antispam toolsets that hook into (normall) Outlook/outlook-express. Fortinet's Forticlient starts at about $75 and gives you Antivirus, antispam, category web filtering and registry protection (along with a VPN client). Some elements are free or free to trial for so many days (although you need perhaps another 128MB RAM for the software to run, but then - I don't mind this as I don't really edit on my Internet PC anyway. Perhaps you do, perhaps you don't either.... Always get yourself the best price for hosted service or client protection. It needn't cost the earth - remember that hotmail, yahoo and google-mail have free protection. See what you can do with the free options first. The companies of course want to put advertising onto the mails, which given that you might forward or reply on them - you might not want that for your business.

spam is a moving target. Whatever protection you have now will be worked around in the near future - this is more certain than your next virus attack. When it comes down to it, your email door always has some amount of an opening on it. Even if the messaging protocols get revamped.

Nick Hope:
I also use a router with the firewall on and Trend Micro anti Spam but I used the Trend Micro before converting to DSL with Alltel. I don't know what Alltel has to deter any spam and they may not have anything in place. So maybe things will slowly get worse.
JJK

I don't know how sensitive your emails are, but I use gmail for domain. You transfer your mx records over to the google appointed mx records and voila, you have gmail at your domain but with gmail services.

j razz

Gmail's still an invitational thing isn't it? What's so great about it apart from the giant storage allocation? Does it work with clients like Thunderbird or is it basically a souped-up Hotmail/Yahoo?

I don't think the gmail for domain is invitational. I think they are wanting businesses to sign up for that. Just do a google search for gmail for domain. The search features are great. You can assign up to 25 email addresses at your domain using gmail's services with each having 2 gigs of storage. You can also place your logo on the sign in page, etc.

As for what is so great about it, I would encourage you to go to their gmail site and read about the differences there. If you need an invite, email me and I will send you one.

j razz

you can't fight spam. Unpublished e-mails of mine get spam. E-mails i've never used but have registered. It gets a lot less spam, but ~5 a day for an e-mail never shown off isn't good imho.

Thanks for the tip and the offer jrazz. Looks good if you've got lots of bandwidth. Being in Thailand I haven't and I'd get frustrated with a web-based email interface. If their spam filtering is awesome then it might be worth considering keeping my existing email address as it looks like there's a pop3 plugin available to allow email download. But I think the situation is a bit past that for me, I'm on so many spammers' lists.

Well, you probably know this, but it's good to have a "throw-away" email address for use when you MUST provide a valid email on websites, etc. Yahoo's bulk email filters are great for this purpose, because they catch the lion's share of spam. And webmail does allow you to view your emails from everywhere, not just the PC with the POP3 program. (For a business you may not like this at all, but for personal mail it's good, IMO).

Changing email addresses is a pain, but as long as you keep your name@fullname.com address you'll continue to be on spammers lists. Which I presume is why you are focussing more on tools and providers..

I fprgot to mention My DSL is a POP.net not a POP3. net.
JJK

Bots scan web sites all of the time looking for email addresses. The best thing to do is not have the actual email address on the site. Good to do is when clicking on email icon a form pops up filled out by the web visitor. The email is sent to you via your web site. The visitor can fill in their own address to get a copy. Once the email arrives your email address is then known to the web visitor.

Don't use short names in your email address. The longer the name and one that includes other characters the less likely to get spam (unless you sign up on other sites using it). You might be able to use a graphic/picture on your site to display your email address rather than the actual address listed in html code.

Thunderbird does a pretty good job of filtering SPAM.

Nick,

Here is something I ran across today that you might want to look into.

The Link

j razz