My email account is being overwhelmed by spam. Over a period of two days I received 149 spam email messages, and Norton Antispam only detected and filtered 29 of those messages. Most of the emails were not even addressed to my email address. I do add the spam messages to the ‘Block Sender’ list in Outlook Express, but the spam emails keep coming! How can I curb the flow of spam to my computer?

As you may have read in previous columns, unfortunately there is no way to definitively stop spam from being sent to your email account. The only effective way to curb the flow of spam is by using spam filtering software on the computer. However, from your question it seems that Norton Antispam is having a difficult time detecting the spam. As you are probably aware, detecting spam is not an exact science - spam filtering software works on the basis of probabilities to determine which messages are likely to be spam and which are legitimate messages. Generally such spam filters err on the side of caution, to avoid having large numbers of legitimate emails identified as possible spam, and subsequently filtered or deleted. That said, as such a large number of spam messages is coming through the software you may wish to increase the sensitivity of the filter in Norton Antispam. Unfortunately, even on the highest sensitivity the spam filter may not be able to detect all spam as spammers use various new techniques (such as embedding images with text into the email message to avoid spam filters scanning the text and identifying key words) to prevent their messages from being identified as spam.

The Blocked Senders list in Outlook Express is a good feature, but unfortunately is not very effective against the latest wave of spam attacks. This is because spammers usually falsify the ‘From’ address of the email messages, so every time they send a spam message it comes from a different sender. Therefore, the Blocked Senders list will be ineffective since the sender’s address changes with every new spam message. However, you did mention that most of the spam messages are not addressed to your email address. This could form the basis for creating a filter/rule within your email client, which specifies that any email not addressed to your email address should be moved into a ‘Spam’ folder for your review and deletion if not a legitimate email. Unfortunately, the message rules capability in Outlook Express is not powerful enough to implement such a rule, so you will need to change email clients. I recommend Mozilla Thunderbird (www.mozilla.com/thunderbird) which is an excellent free open-source email client. Be aware that Norton Antispam appears not to support Mozilla Thunderbird, so if you change email clients you may no longer be able to use Norton Antispam. That said, since this spam filtering software seems ineffective at curbing your spam, it is unlikely to cause you great problems.

Should you change to Mozilla Thunderbird, I recently answered a question from another reader about configuring a message filter to move any messages not explicitly addressed to their email account into a ‘Spam’ folder. You can find these instructions in the Silicon Kid Archive at: www.siliconkid.com.au/index.php/skarchive/viewquestion/1902 . Be aware, there is one possible problem with this setup. If you subscribe to mass email lists or newsletters, which are sent to a newsletter email address rather than your specific email address, the filter will act on these messages. Therefore, I strongly recommend you regularly check the ‘Spam’ folder in case any messages have been accidentally filtered into this folder.

In addition, you may also be interested to know that Thunderbird has an inbuilt spam filtering feature. This can be accessed and configured through the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Junk Mail Controls’. You can find more information on using the Thunderbird Junk Mail feature at: kb.mozillazine.org/Junk_Mail_Controls .

Should all else fail, another way to curb the flow of spam is by changing your email address. This is quite an inconvenient process, but a brand new email address should start afresh, and you should hopefully not receive spam to that account (in the short-term at least). If you do decide to get a new email address be very careful not to give this email address freely out on the internet, otherwise you may find yourself again on spam lists. If you do need to give out an email on the internet, perhaps consider getting a free email account (e.g. Hotmail) for that purpose.