Block Unwanted Email

With how easy it is to screen unwanted calls, you expect it to be a little bit easier to block unwanted email. Unfortunately, the truth is quite far from this as almost everyone knows nowadays. Blocking undesirable emails is an extremely involved process, and often there is no completely infallible way to do it. A lot of us just put up with it, figuring that the only solution is to slog through layers and layers of spam, but some folks refuse to accept that. Maybe they just have higher expectations of technology or maybe they have small children who they don't want to see spam emails. For whatever reason, these folks search for a good solution.

Of course, the best way to block unwanted email is with an allowed email list. You don't need firewalls, you don't need keyword searches, you just need an address book of people who are allowed to email you and a simple filter. The problem with this approach is that, if someone doesn't make it into your address book, they can't send your emails. This means that, for example, long-lost friends can not catch up with you over your email. More importantly, if one of your existing friends or clients changes his or her email address unexpectedly, you will lose contact. This can be quite costly to say the least.

One way to block unwanted email that I've seen work pretty well is to have a certain word that needs to be included in every email that is sent to you. Then you can run a content filter that will only let emails with that word in. It can be pretty much anything as long as it is not a word that generally makes it into spam email. You can take it one step better and get encryption. Make people send you everything encrypted and filter out the emails that are not keyed to your PGP key.

Of course these solutions are a little bit too absolute for a lot of people. Many people prefer to make do with email firewalls and spam filters of various types. Some of these tools to block unwanted email get very sophisticated. I have seen them combine data about the most common email addresses of spammers with sophisticated content filtering. The one problem with this approach is that it sometimes filters out email that is not actually spam. It is rare, but you could lose an important communication because of a spam filter.