Did you know that spam causes more difficulties on your computer than a virus? A virus causes problems only, when it is activated, whereas spam is constantly present on your system. Cleaning your e-mail box manually every day from tens, or even hundreds of spam messages costs an awful lot of time. And the amount of spam will still be increasing in the future, because sending spam is cheap and simple: with just one click on a button, a spammer can reach hundreds of thousands of addresses. And no matter how low the response rate is, there are always people who will respond to an offer.
Zombie PC

A badly secured computer can be misused by help of a virus contamination or a software leak. This kind of a maliciously operating computer is called a zombie-pc and can be used as a 'mailserver', which distributes spam messages without the actual owner knowing it. Such a zombie-pc can be part of a widespread zombie network with computers of thousands of other unsuspecting users. In order to intercept spam from computers of such a zombie network on the way, internet organisations place their internet addresses on so-called blacklists. If a receiving party uses such a blacklist, legitimate e-mails from a zombie-pc can no longer be delivered.
Tricks

Besides, spammers are inventing new tricks in order to mislead filters on a daily basis. Advertising messages are for instance often conceiled in images (image spam). Many spam filters check a message on textual contents. But words in an image cannot be read by a spam filter, and that's how spammers give the filters the runaround.

Moreover, messages are often provided with useless but correct text, in order to fool the filters.
Basic Filters

Outlook Express itself does not filter any spam, whereas Mozilla Thunderbird and the recent Office Outlook versions have a basic spam filter. But in order to get a good result using this basic filter, the user needs to take action. He needs, for example, to 'train' the filter, by marking messages manually as spam over a couple of days. Microsoft standardly puts the setting of their spam filters on 'low risk'. Because of this, it is not up to securing the system against sneaky spam tricks. But putting the setting on 'high risk' would mean that there's a higher risk, that legitimate e-mails would also be moved straight away into the spam folder.
Caretaker

You don't need to worry about spam anymore. Caretaker Antispam combines a number of methods in order to distinguish spam messages from your normal ones. When it comes to identifying spam many features, characteristics and expressions are taken into consideration. The message receives a score by looking at certain features, for example the sender, contents, the make-up, etc. Based on this score, Caretaker Antispam decides, if a message is or is not to be delivered to your inbox. And if you do have a spam filter already, then you can use Caretaker Antispam as additional security.


Features

* Caretaker Antispam finds more spam than other built-in and external spam filters.
* The multi-layer scoresystem van Caretaker Antispam evaluates every incoming e-mail message with regard to:
o widespread heuristics;
o statistic models;
o an innovative image analysis.
* Caretaker Antispam analyses phrases - instead of single words - and thus identifies more spam than traditional text filters (Bayesian filter).
* IMPROVED! Caretaker Antispam identifies image spam, despite diffuse patterns, font size and colours.
* Caretaker Antispam disposes of such kind of imagery tricks for text recognition (OCR), by e.g. innovatively distinguishing between foreground and background.
* IMPROVED! Caretaker Antispam grasps also tricks such as URL spam, stitched images, Invisible ink, PDF spam, Excel spam, etc.
* NEW! Caretaker Antispam detects potentially dangerous files: it checks the contents of attachments with executable files on suspicious functions.
* IMPROVED! Sending and receiving e-mails is a fast process, due to the fact that Caretaker Antispam parallely performs all its tasks regarding evaluating and judging. Enormous computing routines are directly written in Assembler.
* Caretaker Antispam provides your outgoing e-mail messages with a specific (indiscernible) stamp, because of which spam filters of most of the internet providers will trust your message.
* ? You or your contacts do not need to maintain whitelists.
* Caretaker Antispam does not conflict with other existing spam filters and can function as an addition.
* Caretaker Antispam operates transparently and direct, just as you expect it;
o Within Caretaker Antispam you don't need to configure anything;
o Caretaker Antispam does not make any changes to server or account settings;
o Caretaker Antispam does not place any toolbars or buttons.
* IMPROVED! Caretaker Antispam operates on e-mail programs with support for POP3/SMTP; like Office Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Thunderbird, The Bat! and IncrediMail.
* Caretaker Antispam requires Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or VISTA and works also with 64-bit Windows (x64).