Hey, I'm a cynic too! I didn't believe it either. Surely you can't eliminate 100% of spam. 60%-70% possibly, 90% on a good day, but never 100%. But I was wrong.
My judgement had been based on my previous experience of trying to rid myself of spam. Before discovering SpamArrest I had been using programs that tried to filter spam out. Depending on how zealous I was in creating and adjusting my spam filters, those programs enabled me to achieve some success, but they had at least two to three problems associated with them.
First, they required maintenance. You had to create or adjust the filters to get good results.
Secondly, they were always imperfect. Some spam always got through. You never caught 100%. The spammers were always ahead of the filters.
Thirdly, although not such an issue with broadband connections, you usually had to download the spam before it could be filtered - so the spam was either filtered out or slipped under your defences, it was always polluting your machine (a serious issued given the high proportion of spam that contains pornographic images).
SpamArrest is brilliant because it tackles the issue in a completely different way. Instead of saying: "We will let all email through and then look to see if any of it is spam, with the onus on us, the receiver, to look for the spam in some way", it says: "We will block all emails and put the onus on the sender to prove that they are genuine." Consequently 100% of spam is blocked, and a high proportion of unwanted circular letters because only genuine individual senders bother to authenticate themselves, thus allowing delivery of their emails.
What happens is this. You keep your existing email throughout. You sign up for SpamArrest and get a free 30 day trial. You let SpamArrest know the details of your email address and they collect all mail delivered to your email address. You make a simple adjustment to your email program to download your mail from Spamarrest. Everytime someone sends an email to your email address, SpamArrest sends them a polite challenge email from you (you can personalise the wording at any stage). Basically the challenge email says:
* This email is from SpamArrest User X.
* The email you sent will not be delivered until you authenticate yourself. Follow these simple instructions to prove that you are a real human being and not a computer automatically generating spam.
* You will only need to do this once.
Then sit back and see the immediate end to 100% of spam.
You can logon to SpamArrest at any time to allow particular addresses (you can upload your contacts) or remove/ban a particular address.
I have been using SpamArrest since July 2003. At the time of writing, since signing up, I have received 22,246 emails, of which only 2,743 have been legitimate letters. SpamArrest has killed 100% of my spam (over 87% of my emails). Perhaps you can see why I am so enthusiastic about it. Try it now, for free.
Perhaps the most satisfying thing is the knowledge that the spam is just hanging in cyberspace. It doesn't come within a mile of my machine.
Footnote:
Recently Blue Frog introduced another novel solution to hitting spam before it reached you. Now that Blue Frog has been killed by a spammer, there is even more reason to signup for SpamArrest.
