Free Spam Blocker - A Review of Cactus Spam Filter

The amount of spam being sent is on the rise. Unsolicited email now accountsfor over 50% of email traffic. There aresteps that you can take to cut down on the volume that you receive. The last line of defense is to have a personalspam filter on your computer. There are a number of filtering solutions, althoughmost come at a cost. One of the freepieces of software is called Cactus Spam Filter. Here’s our review.

The product is easy to download and to install. In fact that is one of the bestthings about the product – ease of use. Don’t be worried that you are going to have to read through another massive manual to get the thing up and running. Refreshingly, the instructions are only one page long.

Once you have set up the software, any messages that it suspects are spam are tagged. Thistag is a message that is added to the subject line such as “CACTUS SPAM”. It is then a fairly simple task to create a new folder in Outlook and set up a rule that says move all emailscontaining the words “CACTUS SPAM” in the subject to the new spam folder.

You can then periodically check your spam folder to make sure that the software hasn’t tagged any emails from your friends by mistake. Once you’ve made sure there are no ‘false positives’, you can delete the remaining spam. The beauty of this system is that you ultimately make the decision to delete which emails. The system cannot delete anything for you; it therefore can’t delete anything by mistake.

The software also has a ‘training‘ feature so the more you use it the more it gets used to the type of emails that you mark as spam. This makes it more effective at detecting junk emails in the future.

For a free piece of software, Cactus Spam Filter works very well. It is easy to install and simple to use. What more could you expect?