How would you like to be bombarded with over 1600 spam messages a day? Welcome to my world. As Mr. Internet® I get more spam than any 10 REALTORS® combined. Yet, almost none of it crosses my in box and all the "real" mail gets through. Here are the two simple steps I've taken to almost completely eliminate spam as an annoyance.

The problem with most anti-spam solutions is that either a) they are too cumbersum to implement, b) they sometimes stop messages that should get through, or c) they simply don't do a good job of catching real spam.

I take a two-step approach to eliminating spam that is easy, effective, and lets the good mail get through.

STEP 1:  I forward all my inbound e-mail through an Earthlink account that has their SpamBlocker service set on "medium" (NOTE: the highest setting stops all mail forcing you to give thumbs up or down on each piece --way too time consuming).  The medium setting on the other hand implements the very effective Brightmail service which filters out about 80% of all known spam with virtually no false-positives (i.e. no legitimate mail tagged as spam). However 20% of spam getting through is still way too much, which is why STEP 2 below is necessary.

STEP 2: Everything that shows up in my Outlook inbox gets further examined and filtered by Cloudmark Spamnet software which is a collaborative spam filter that becomes more effective the more people that use it (as of this writing they have over 1,000,000 users of this service). Cloudmark Spamnet can be tried for free and installs directly into your Outlook software where it works seamlessly and unobtrusively. If you decide to buy it (strongly recommended), it costs only US$39.95 per year.

This last step eliminates almost all remaining spam and has caught only a handful of false-positives in the months that I've used the service. The beauty of Cloudmark Spamnet is that it is "collaborative," meaning that it gets smarter the more people that use it since it learns from all its users what is spam and what isn't.

Now you might ask why don't I just use Cloudmark Spamnet instead of going through the trouble of forwarding my e-mail to Earthlink first. That first step prevents the bulk of spam from ever reaching my inbox, thus saving me considerable time, effort and disk space. Cloudmark Spamnet only handles spam that actually makes it through to your inbox, so the less it has to work with, the better.

While the above strategy works very well (the best I've ever tried in fact), it is still annoying that spam even exists. Hopefully, this will not be for much longer. The economic costs of spam are so high that the big guns of Microsoft and many other tech leaders have made it a priority to eliminate it by 2006. It's a lofty goal, however using some sort of sender authentication process it is attainable. Now take a moment to imagine a world without spam —we might even be able to get some work done!