Every day, both dmoestic and corporate users of the internet receive considerable amounts of spam e-mail. They are not only annoying, but sometimes you can miss an important e-mail or newsletter simply because you lose it among the great number of e-mails that flood out your Inbox. Often you'll find that important people neglect to read your e-mail, because busy people like them hardly have the time and patience to browse through the huge quantities of spam mail they receive.

One solution to this problem is a filter or a free spam blocker. Many companies have designed filters for their customers. Many e-mail servers, especially the renowned ones that have a reputation to protect, have their own free spam blocker. There are several types of programs that can help you stop spam, including:

- the ones that are offered when you create a new e-mail address. Every company that provides e-mail service has a spam filter, including those that offer free accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and so forth.

- there are also standalone programs that go through your mail folders regularly and do their best to separate valid e-mail from spam and unwanted mail. The main disadvantage with these free spam blockers is the fact that, when they do their checks, they use quite a large percentage of your computer's resources and sometimes also of your bandwidth. Before installing this kind of free spam blocker, you'll need to decide if this is okay with you.

- other types of free spam blockers are the ones that work as plug-ins to other programs like e-mail clients. The disadvantage with this kind of approach is that you need to download all your mail anyway, before the plug-in can do its stuff.

When you decide to use a filter, you must be sure that you update it or install new versions regularly, because marketing researchers working for spammres are continuously developing new ways of 'fooling' the filters. Filter makers must keep up by improving their software accordingly.

A free spam blocker works by looking for trigger words or phrases inside the text of the e-mails, and categorizing e-mails on that basis. Nowadays, there are special programs being created that are designed to pass spam through free spam blockers by re-arranging words or using a different language style in the e-mails. This is an unfair marketing strategy, of course, but if you want to be protected against it, you must always have an up-to-date version of your free spam blocker program.

Specialists recommend that you should review your needs and see what kind of filter suits you best. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages. You must make up your mind whether you want to use the default filter on the e-mail server, or if you want to download all your mail before scanning them, or if you are willing to share your bandwidth with a standalone application. The best way is of course, if you can blend all the programs in one, but that's not always practicable. Still, it is advisable that you should not remain satisfied with the free spam blocker that your e-mail server provides, because you will probably continue to receive unwanted mail in spite of it. Using a plugin in addition to server-side filters is viewed by many experts as the most effective way of getting rid of spam, considering the trivial effort it takes to set up.