The news of the shutdown of a major spam source in the US gives you some warm feelings about the constant stream of poorly targeted rubbish in your inbox, but the rate at which you will see them will grow again soon enough. So as a small business or independent consultant/freelancer what do you do about it?
One thing you can do is use an email client with built-in Bayesian filters for spam such as Thunderbird, but what happens if you are using Microsoft Outlook or Windows Mail? Outlook has a basic tool for filtering spam but frankly it is just a simple blacklist mechanism and not worth actuating it for what it does and I recommend not activating it.
Well what you can do is use Spambayes, a slowly/quietly developing solution which is a simple Bayesian spam filter implementation primarily for Outlook, which is open source and therefore freely available. I have used this for going on four years and it is very effective even from the start without any learning. Once it has learned up on the steady stream that you highlight, it operates very well with few (if any) false positives and it comes to the point that you forget that you have it implemented for the amount of Spam that you actually see.
One thing though, periodically (about once a year), the constant anti-spam filter methods of the spammers does have an effect, so you do have to reset the rulebase but this is so easy that it is not a problem at all. Highly recommended, and you can download it here.
