Dude, where's my email?

Spam filters are quickly becoming a fact of life for users. For many people their email is virtually unmanageable without some sort of filtering mechanism weeding out the junk.

With most client-side anti spam email software - users have the option to review intercepted messages. This lets them recover and white-list items they in fact wanted. Most users also have at least minimal server-side filtering. Typically mail caught by these filters is never revealed to the user.

With all this anti spam filtering - it shouldn't be a surprise that at least a little mail goes missing.

One of the most common problems is that users either knowingly or unknowingly load up their email with crap that makes it look like spam. It's difficult for spam filters to distinguish a 400x300 image of a rainbow from a 400x300 image of something very naughty. Recently Microsoft implemented some Outlook anti-spam software that let users block these unwanted pictures.

Various email utilities such as Hotbar and Incredimail are at least partially to blame. They make loading email up with this crap entirely too easy for users. SpamButcher can be used as an Outlook anti spam solution and is available as a 21-day trial download.

Do you think everyone wants to see an animated F-16, the Statue of Liberty and your pet terrier all in the same message? Have you thought of the plight of your fellow user when they try to download your 1823k email over their 56k connection? Not pretty, is it?

So maybe it's not such a bad thing that some of this mail is going in the dumpster.

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