Not only are anti spam filtering programs important to keep your computers safe from potential online hackers, viruses and bots, they are also an important time saving feature. For example, if you own or manage a small business, if each of your employees spent just several minutes per day reviewing and deleting spam emails, he or she would end up wasting over 20 billable hours annually. Multiplying twenty hours by the number of employees affected and you have just discovered a major time and money drain for your company. Investing in effective anti-spam practices makes sound financial sense in terms of productivity and computer IT savings.

As online spam continues to increase many people have turned to anti-spam programs. The spam peddlers and the software manufactures are engaged in a battle. As the spam proliferators continue to change up their antics the anti-spam programs themselves have had to upgrade their software, now it has reached the point where some of the software is so complicated, and requires so many time consuming updates, that it to is almost not worth it.

Today's best solution seems to lie in the hands of companies which allow you to run your emails through their servers and filters. These companies run all incoming emails through many tests and weed out the spam. This cuts spam off at the pass and your server will never have to encounter the spam emails. An added benefit to using these third party servers for sifting your email, is these spam messages will no longer take up room on your server.

As mentioned earlier the spam peddlers are upping their skill levels everyday. So, while using a third party server will greatly reduce your risk, relying on one method alone is not sound. As a backup measure it is a good idea to have your own anti spam software running. The best prevention is remember when in doubt throw it out. If you receive a message from an unknown sender, do not open it, click on it, or reply to it. Just like junk mail received in your home's mailbox simply throw the sucker out into your computer's recycle bin.