Free Spam Blockers

Remember when spam was just another horrible thing you would never eat? And then you grew up a little and spam became the lyrics to a great Monty Python song. And now spam is something to avoid at all costs. Or, in the case of free spam blockers, at no cost at all. Everything is better when it’s free, right? Such is the case with blocking out annoying spam from your email account, too.

Free spam blockers are popping up all over the internet. Kind of ironic, isn’t it, that some pop-up ads are advertising spam blocking technology. The problem with spam isn’t really the content, of course, it’s the time spent winnowing through all those e-mails in search of the ones that really contain useful information or are from people with whom you want to contact. The best free spam blockers in the world are not only free, but don’t take up any space on your computer. Yes, I’m talking about being very careful to whom you give your e-mail address.

The plain simple truth is that any time you fill out a form that asks for your e-mail address, you are just asking for spam. Maybe the site where you filled out the form sold your address to mass marketers and maybe they didn’t, but chances are if you have ever given your e-mail address to a company rather than an individual, you received spam because of it. And if you’re like most people doing business on the internet, you’re spending anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half just checking your e-mail every day. You don’t have time to wade through the spam pool. That’s why getting yourself one of the reliable free spam blockers out there is so important.

You can almost instantly tell when you’ve come across one of these free spam blockers because of their oh-so-clever name. For instance, Spamhilator, SpamButcher, or SpamKiller. And you want to know a secret? They are almost all exactly alike. Oh sure, there are little differences that may mean a lot to you personally, but frankly it doesn’t matter. The best thing you can do is download them as a trial version—and with so many on the market offering trial versions, it makes no sense to ever download any of the free spam blockers that don’t offer trial versions—and check them out to make sure they do what they promise. And if they do what they promise, do they do it with a minimum amount of fuss and muss and maintenance on you part.

The key to using free spam blockers is maintenance. You got one in the first place to give yourself more time to do what you need to do. So why would you want to use a spam blocker is high maintenance itself? Go through all the free spam blockers that interest you and then narrow them down until you find the one that works completely in the background without throwing out stuff you really need and that doesn’t require you to keep checking up on it. That’s the one you want.

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Fighting Spam!

It's been nearly a decade since spammers and their enemies begun evolving competitively. As with the classic cheetah/gazelle model originally formulated by Darwin, each time one group becomes a little faster or more agile, its adversaries develop traits for outwitting and outrunning it.

In addition to wasting people's time with unwanted e-mail, spam also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. Consequently, there are many organizations, as well as individuals, who have taken it upon themselves to fight spam with a variety of techniques. But because the Internet is public, there is really little that can be done to prevent spam, just as it is impossible to prevent junk mail.

Nobody wants it or ever asks for it. No one ever eats it; it is the first item to be pushed to the side when eating the entree. Sometimes it is actually tasty, like 1% of junk mail that is really useful to some people.

The number of unsolicted commercial electronic messages received by the average American in 2001 was 571, according to Jupiter Media Metrix. By 2006, Jupiter says, that number will increase to 1,400, with more than 206 billion spam messages going out over the course of the year. While these numbers are notoriously difficult to calculate, every survey and ISP record points to dramatic increases in spam, sometimes as much as 300 percent year over year. One reliable indicator of the problem's magnitude is the size of the anti-spam effort. The range of tools available to ISPs, enterprises and consumers in the fight against spam grew considerably during the Web bubble. Simultaneously, heavyweight Web marketers and interactive ad players have been scrambling to distinguish their services from the bad guys, as well as to counteract growing calls for government controls on digital marketing.

In one of the biggest such moves, the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), through its subsidiary, the Association of Interactive Marketing (AIM), has released online commercial solicitation guidelines in an effort to promote high ethical standards among marketers. The rules require that members let e-mail recipients know how they can refuse future mailings and allow consumers to prevent the sale or rental of their addresses

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