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41 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Some comments 1 year later, June 14, 2003
I used I Hate Spam! for a year and was quite satisfied with it, and it's a very good spam filter program. I wrote a very positive review some months ago for it, and it has certainly served me well. It was easy to configure and although I was only using it with Outlook Express, which doesn't have all the filter options compared to Outlook, it was still able to catch about 80% of the spam. I had also researched the other spam filter programs before buying this one, and it had very good reviews on Amazon, compared to McAfee's Spamkiller, which I'd already bought, but hadn't opened yet. So I returned it and exchanged it for I Hate Spam!One nice feature of the program is it allows you to "bounce" unwanted emails back to their source. This sends a return email that looks like its from the main email router that your address is invalid, which hopefully causes it to be removed from the spammer's mailing list sometimes. I don't know how effective this really is, but they're a certain amount of satisfaction in bouncing their message back to them and clogging up their mailbox with unwanted messages too. My only problem with it is that since I only have 128 megs of RAM with XP, after some months the spam filters got so large my email ran quite slow and my hard disk started thrashing a lot. I was surprised the combination of Outlook and I Hate Spam! had gotten that memory intensive, but the spam filters update regularly from the web, and after a while the filter database gets quite big, and every email gets compared against it, which takes some time. Anyway, over the last several years my spam load has probably increased 10 times, to the point where I'm getting 10 times as much spam as actual email. That plus the memory issues I was experiencing meant my email downloads were taking a long time even though I only get 2-3 emails a day, and I was getting 20-30 spam messages. That's not much compared to several people I know who get 100 spam emails a day, but still, I finally decided to bite the bullet and change my email account name. You can usually do this through the webmail interface for your ISP. Mine is Earthlink, so I went to their Account Maintenance page, selected eMail, and went through the steps to change my email address. Now I get zero spam and no more viruses either, which were getting more and more frequent, since I'd gotten on probably dozens of spammer mailing lists. Recently I got on the ones for Viagra and was getting lots of those. Then I started getting the ones for penis enlargement products, which I suppose was only inevitable after getting on the Viagra lists. Oh well, that's modern life for you. Anyway, it was at that point that I decided to change my email name. For some people this isn't practical for professional reasons or business reasons, but I'm retired so although I have about 100 correspondents, it's no big deal. I sent out a message to my entire distribution list that my email name was changing after four or five years, and to make a note of it. Of course, 3/4 of those people won't do that and will fail to put the new name in their address book, but oh well. Anyway, I recommend you do this too if you possibly can. At this point I don't even need I Hate Spam!, but I still run it anyway since it's so much faster now. One last word of caution. I got all that spam because when I first got online about 5 years ago I not too wisely signed up at various webpages for various online information services such as electronic magazines, or information updates on various subjects I was interested in, and other free stuff, and after awhile, everybody and anybody had my email address. So be careful what you sign up for. Otherwise you'll have more email than you know what to do with. Another way this happens is if someone you know gets one of those Outlook email viruses that sends emails out to everybody in your address book. Now you'll be getting emails forever with that virus in it since you'll be on the list of people to email. This is one reason why it's important to have an anti-virus program too in addition to a spamkiller. Overall, a fine program, although if you take my recommendation to change your email name, you probably won't need a spam filter. :-)
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