Tracking and reporting spammers takes a certain amount of time and energy - resources which may be in short supply for some people. You may find it more convenient to block spam entirely from your email box, or to filter it out into a separate mail folder - perhaps your trash folder - without dealing with it at all. Here are some programs and routines which can help you.

A Procmail Filter

Procmail is a Unix utility which can be used to filter, forward and autoreply to email. If you receive your email on Unix system you might want to consider the use of a procmail filter to handle spam before it gets into your in-box.

A sendmail patch

If you are a system administrator plagued with spam on your system, this patch to sendmail may help you shut the front door on spam email.

Eudora Pro for Windows

From Qualcomm Software, this excellent, professional quality mail management program has a built-in filtering system which comes as close to the functionality of Unix procmail as a Windows program can. The freeware version of this program, Eudora Lite, is probably the most popular of all Windows Internet mail managers, however the filtering facilities are only available in the commercial version. The price is $89.00.

Peter Beim's page on How to filter spam with Eudora 3.0 gives complete instructions for setting up filters and an autoresponder using Eudora Pro.

Newman's Trombone

Newman's Trombone is a shareware Windows utility for pre-deleting email from a mail server based on user configurable rules. If you receive lots of spam email, you may find this handy. The trial period for the software is 2 weeks and the registration fee is a very reasonable $15.

SpamHater

SpamHater will analyze a piece of spam, extract the addresses of relevant systems, compose a reply letter and post it to your ougtoing mail queue addressed to appropriate postmasters and system administrators. If you're into doing the Right Thing about spam (rather than just filtering it out), this program could save you a lot of time.

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