I am greeted with about 75 pieces of spam in my inbox every morning and then bunches more appear throughout the day. As some readers might remember, I use an email client called Barca from Poco Systems (http://www.pocosystems.com) because I hate Outlook and all its variants.
As an email program, Barca isn’t bad, but it’s ability to keep spam out of my inbox is terrible. I’ve endlessly tweaked settings and such and it still can’t figure it out. Maybe my spam is just special. Who knows? But suffice it to say, it’s been tedious, since I have seven email accounts. That’s a lot of spam.
One thing that’s great about Barca and PocoMail is that they have very active support forums, so if you’re having a problem, you can probably find someone else who has whined about it first.
As it turns out, I’m not the only person who thinks Barca’s spam handling isn’t so hot. Some people have no problems, others do. But in the support forums, I found a reference to a program from G-Lock Software called SpamCombat. You can find the free download at their site:
As I’ve lamented in the past, as a general rule, today’s email clients either don’t let you download only email headers, or they make it so cumbersome that it’s hard to use. Barca’s header feature only lets you do one account at a time, which makes it so slow as to be almost unusable. Plus, it’s completely manual, so you can’t just tell it, "go get headers every 15 minutes."
If I want to set Barca up to work in automatic mode, I’m letting everything into my email box: the good and the bad. That’s just dangerous and has bothered me. (Thank goodness my Norton is alive and kicking anyway.)
Enter SpamCombat. I got the free download and tried it on one email account for a month or so. Unlike Barca, it can actually TELL the stuff I want from the spam I don’t want. It color codes the headers, so you can tell them apart easily. And you can delete what you don’t want while it is still on the server so nothing nasty accidentally ends up on your hard disk to cause trouble.
The free version of SpamCombat lets you use it on one email account. After using it for a while, I realized how liberating it was to be able to set it to check for headers automatically and basically forget about my email. So I spent the $35 for the paid version, and added all my other accounts. Because it "learns" how to tell your good and bad emails apart, I’d already trained it, which is great.