30 Top Freeware Spam Filters

E-mail spam, also sometimes referred as "bulk e-mail" or "junk e-mail," involves a vast amount of nearly identical messages to be sent to the numerous recipients by e-mail. E-mail addresses are collected from chatrooms, websites, newsgroups, social networking sites and viruses which harvest users address books, and are sold to other spammers. I do not need, probably, to tell you, how serious the problem is, as if you did not come online yesterday, you would be familiar personally with the problem. However, I will just show you some stats to highlight its global character. Kelly Liyakasa spared some spam-related statistics (Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/spam-articles/spam-statistics-168033.html) that will catch your attention:

• The average PC user receives over 2,000 spammed emails per year.
• The average computer user receives about 10 spam email per day.
• About 28% of people answer spam emails - wrong action!
• 15-20% of corporate email is spam.
• 63% of “take my email off your list” aren’t fulfilled, and even can bring more spam.
• 86% of emails posted on websites end up receiving spam.

More recent spam stats will give you the recent trends and distribution per country of origin (Source: http://www.commtouch.com/Site/Resources/statistics.asp).

One of the ways to fight the spam is using the disposable email addresses, not giving your real one in the situation where there is a good way that your address might be misused. More about this spam-fighting approach you can read in my publication “ 40 Free Disposable Email Address Services to Fight Spam”.
But, what can you do, if your email address is already on the spammers’ lists? Changing it for a clean one might be time-consuming and complicated, as you have to notify all your friends, customers, and other trusted sources on the email address changes. If you use Web-based email address, your server is supposed to take care of the problem by installing the appropriable filters on the server. It might be more or less successful, but, as far as I know, there is no free solution to significantly improve the process. My spouse, for example, never gets my emails to her Yahoo! Account, as all mail with Hyperlinks in the signatures goes directly to the bulk mail folder. But, if you use the stand-alone POP3 email client on your Hard Drive, the responsibility to filter out the incoming mail is yours.

I have prepared the Rating List with 30 Freeware Utilities to filter incoming email messages for your Email Client on RateItAll Web Site (as usual)
http://www.rateitall.com/t-24874-anti-spam-freeware-utilities.aspx

All the programs have brief description, rating, and links for downloading.