E-mail is now being abused. The flow of spam on the Internet is the proof. It is annoying to download hundreds of disgusting spam emails into the inbox looking for some legitimate messages. Not only you waste your valuable time to delete junk emails by hand, you also waste your money as each spam message in your inbox takes precious kilobytes of bandwidth you paid for. In addition, spam messages can contain viruses, which can infect your computer system, and hidden tracking codes, which work as soon as you click on the message and let the spammer know that your email address is valid. With all that said, it would be great to delete the messages that you don't want to receive beforehand and launch your email client to pull down only good emails. Anti-spam software can do this for you. It helps you fight against annoying spam.

There is a wide choice of anti-spam filters available on the Internet. The common services or features they offer are:

? Whitelist and Blacklist. The decision whether an email message is spam or good is taken based on the sender's email address. The whitelist contains 'friendly' email addresses, and the blacklist contains potential spammers, or simply people you don't want to communicate with.

? Filtering based on the message subject or content. Some words or phrases are met in spam emails more often than others. These are usually vulgar or adult words (sometimes too offending). Thus, filtering based on a keyword is rather helpful.

? Virus scanning. There is possibility that spam email contains a virus in the attachment. Certain anti-spam programs allow you block emails with various suspicious attachments.

? Automatic spam detection. Some anti-spam filters can check inbound email and delete the emails they consider as spam automatically at a regular basis.

? Email recovering. Some spam blockers provide you with the ability to move spam emails to a quarantine folder and keep them for a fixed number of days. In addition, there is the possibility to recover an email from the trash if you need it.

So, with the great features and benefits that antispam software offers, you can now easily block the majority of spam emails.