Inexpensive Spam Control for Individuals and Small Organizations

When individuals and small organizations consider possible spam control solutions, they have many options to consider. Often, price is a major concern and the true expense of various approaches is not always obvious.

If purchasing anti-spam software for the desktop, pay close attention to the vendor's update policy. Most software authors take the approach of selling their software for a fairly low price, but then requiring payment for subsequent patches and upgrades. Over a few years, a product's actual cost can be many times its original purchase price. In contrast, SpamButcher's purchase price of $29.95 includes free access to future releases and updates to the product.

Many small companies rely on their ISPs to provide spam email protection for them. Service providers can commonly provide anti-spam functionality using one of the various open-source spam control measures. When customers find too much spam is getting through, they can sometimes "turn up" the amount of filtering done by their provider without extra charge.

Providers commonly tune their filters by default to catch a reasonable percentage of spam while keeping the risk of blocking wanted email fairly low. By setting the filters to be more aggressive, it increases the risk of stopping legitimately sent email.

The risk is compounded by the fact that many server-side filtering tools don't provide an easy way for end-users to review and recover messages that were intercepted. Since nearly all client-side spam control tools provide this functionality, they pose less risk of permanently losing a critical message blocked by the spam detector.

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