Choosing Anti-Spam Software

• Independence from other email programs - standalone spam filtering tool, which checks all incoming emails on the server, detects and deletes spam messages.
   
• Deletion of spam before it reaches your inbox. Spam won't eat your precious bandwidth and money. Plus, you will protect yourself against viruses, which can be hidden in spam emails and slip onto your computer when you open the message.
   
• Powerful anti-spam filters built in one program that analyze the message from "outside" and "inside": message header, message body, and message source. Flexible whitelist and blacklist easy to edit and update are also very useful as they help save much time when filtering emails. Good anti-spam software must also have the Bayesian filter in its arsenal of spam filtering tools.
   
• Safe preview of emails flagged as spam and marked for deletion. Inherent in anti-spam technology is the fact that there will be false positives and false negatives, i.e., email can be flagged as spam even though it is not actually spam and vice versa.
   
• Flexible spam filtering. You must be able to choose either to delete the emails flagged as spam permanently, or move them to a separate folder for possible recovering in the case of false positive.
   
• Capability to recover an email if it was accidentally marked as spam and trashed.
   
• Capability to filter spam in the automatic mode. Not obligatory but very convenient.