A few months ago I started receiving all sorts of emails, some referring to relief efforts and other saying how I can earn quick profits for my company. Obviously these are spam messages so I configured the Outlook Express Blocked Senders List to filter messages with spam-like subjects and From addresses. While the Blocked Senders List seems to be blocking some unsolicited emails I am still receiving quite a few. Is there any free spam filter that could help block such messages? I previously used my ISPs spam filter but had to disable this feature because it was consistently blocking emails from one of my friends. The computer is running Windows XP SP3.

As you have discovered, the Outlook Express Blocked Senders List is essentially a good description of what it does – block senders. It does not do any spam detection itself, but instead simply looks at the From address of emails (and the subject or other criteria, as you may have setup) and if an incoming message meets that criteria it will take the appropriate action. What you seem to need is an actual spam filter that employs heuristics to dynamically detect and learn what you classify as spam. You mentioned that previously you used the spam filter provided by your ISP, which would have been enabled on your mailbox on your ISP’s email server, but you had to stop using this feature because it was blocking emails from one of your friends. It may be worthwhile to reinvestigate this option again and check whether the ISP spam filter has a whitelist. This is a list where you can specify specific email addresses that always pass-through the spam filter regardless of their content. If the spam filter does offer this capability you could simply add your friend’s email address to the whitelist and it will always bypass the spam filter.

However, if you still find that your ISP’s email filter is still not meeting your needs then you may need to look at an alternative spam filtering solution. There are quite a few free spam filters but I have not used any of these so cannot offer a recommendation on the best or most effective spam filtering utility. However, one of the better spam filtering utilities which I have seen is SpamBayes (spambayes.sourceforge.net). This is a free, open-source spam filtering utility which uses an algorithm to determine statistically whether a message is spam or not. SpamBayes works well with Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and many other email clients. The reason I also prefer this over other options is because SpamBayes is open-source. With other so-called “free” spam filters you may get some functionality for free and then need to pay to get full functionality. However, with this product you get everything and you can also be confident there are no hidden features (e.g. adware, spyware) since the product is open source. I would be interested to hear about your experiences with SpamBayes, or any other spam filtering product that you decide to install.