s sound familiar? You get so much spam that
you have to keep your finger on the delete button whenever
you check your email. Then you inevitably erase the one or
two important messages that you really needed to see, so
you have to sift through all the spam again in your Trash
folder to find them.
If you go out of town for a couple of days, your inbox
fills up with junk and your important messages start to
bounce before you can return to your computer to clean out
your inbox and make room.
That was my situation. I have a spam filter at the ISP
level, which really does not seem to filter out much. And I
tried a couple of other spam filtering solutions, but they
delayed my email too much, and I never fully trusted that
everything was getting through.
I tried SpamArrest after noticing that a colleague was
using it, but my expectations were not terribly high
because the other filtering solutions that I had tried just
did not work for me.
How Does it Work?
When you sign up for a SpamArrest account, you simply make
a few changes to your email program (such as Outlook or
Eudora) so that SpamArrest can download your email from
your ISP to the Spam Arrest mail server. Then SpamArrest
sorts it and filters whatever you do not want. I expected
to have a little trouble configuring my email account
correctly, but it was no sweat at all. The instructions are
very detailed and easy to follow. They definitely cater to
the layperson, so there is no jargon. And if you do have
trouble, you can get technical support via email.
The basic SpamArrest account allows you to filter up to 5
email accounts. And they have a webmail feature, too, so
you can access your mail by logging into your account at
the SpamArrest website. It is great if you are traveling
and just want to check in.
Once your email accounts are configured, you simply decide
whose email you would like to continue to receive. You can
preauthorize senders by typing in specific email addresses,
by using a special import feature, or by preauthorizing
entire domain names.
When someone who is not on your preauthorized list tries to
email you, she will receive an email asking her to verify
her intent to send you the message. The idea is that a
real human being will verify her identity, but a spambot or
automated mailing system will not.
One of my favorite parts of the SpamArrest system is that
anyone who is on your preauthorized list is never sent a
verification email at all. So you can easily set it up such
that your friends, relatives, and colleagues never know you
are filtering your messages.
Once someone responds to the verification email, she is
added to your list of authorized senders. Then her original
email (and all subsequent emails she sends you) will get
through.
You can always remove people from your list of approved
senders, too, so you have total control of whose email gets
to your inbox.
If a verification email is not responded to, the email
stays in a special “Unverified” folder in your online
SpamArrest inbox for a whole week. That way, you can log in
and check to see if any important messages were not
verified. For example, sometimes I will forget that I
signed up for an email newsletter, so I simply authorize
the sender by clicking a button on the screen. Then the
message, and all subsequent messages from this particular
email address, will go right to my inbox and skip the
“Unverified” folder altogether.
Right after I opened my SpamArrest account, I checked this
Unverified folder every day, but now I find that most of
the senders that I want email from are already on the
authorized list, so I check in only every few days. It is
easy to tell which messages in your Unverified folder are
new since your last login, because they stay in bold
typeface until you log out.
According to the SpamArrest statistics on my account, a
full 63.64 percent of my email to date has been spam. It is
such a great relief to know that it never made it to my
inbox at all. I save a lot of time each morning, and I
enjoy sending and receiving email again.
How Much Does it Cost?
At the time of this writing, SpamArrest subscriptions are
$5.95 per month (or you can save by signing up for a year
or two at a time: $44.95 for one year and $74.95 for two
years.) You can add features for an additional fee, but I
have the basic subscription and have never needed anything
beyond that.
You can get a 30 day free trial of SpamArrest here:
http://www.momscape.com/product-reviews/spamarrest.htm
And see the latest coupon codes here:
http://www.momscape.com/coupon-codes
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