SpamArrest

Free e-mail spam filtering for 30 days so you can try it out and see if it really can help.

Andy Pepper, WeLikeArtist.com’s founding editor, saves his inbox, and his sanity, in an instant.

It’s one of those things - you can’t work in the professional visual arts without some contact with the Internet and e-mail.  That means an inbox full of unwanted messages which you have to do something about. Research suggests that around 80% of ALL e-mails are spam or some form of virus message!

I’m a prime target for spam. My e-mail address is publicly available on several websites, gallery sites and projects I’ve worked on.  At the peak I was receiving over 1,500 e-mails a day. That’s a lot of junk!  Anyone for Viagra, cut-price meds or an opportunity to give some crook my bank details?

The problem is I had to deal with it.  Each morning I would sit down at my computer and go through the previous evening’s inbox full of messages. Only a tiny portion of them were useful, or important, but I still had to look at them to try and find out which ones were worth opening. You do lose the will to live after doing this for a few weeks and the attraction of pulling the plug on the broadband connection becomes very attractive!

Perhaps you do have a lot of time on your hands. Perhaps you enjoy deleting the junk each day but think of it in two ways. What could you be doing with the extra time if you weren't messing about sifting through unwanted e-mail or, how much do you charge out your time to a client each hour? Add it up - the time and money you spend dealing with junk e-mail is phenomenal.

Example

Let's say you charge out your time at £40.00 per hour (a mid-range professional charge). It takes you half an hour a day to sift through your junk e-mail. That's costing you £20.00 per day. Do that five days a week (give yourself the weekend off!) and, taking into account that you go away on holiday or have a few days away from the e-mail, it is costing you around £4,000.00 a year! That is money you could be invoicing people for.

Like most modern computers, mine has an e-mail program which filters out spam by ‘learning’ just what spam was (according to what I ‘told’ it) and, although it helped, it wasn’t completely fool-proof. Often important messages were confined to the ‘junk’ folder and I missed them.

Eventually I decided life was too short and looked for an alternative which, after a lot of research, turned out to be SpamArrest. I signed up for a free, 30-day, trial, set it up (which was relatively simple) and my junk mail stopped immediately. Not a single spam message - instantly!

http://www.spamarrest.com*

Now, I know companies often tell you how successful their product is, but for something to be 100% effective, instantly, was a revelation - not least because I have a jaundiced view of business and over-hyped products.

Not surprisingly, once my free trial was over, I took out a subscription. That was in 2005 and I keep renewing. It is worth every penny and isn’t really that expensive compared to the piece of mind I have, and the extra time.

How it works

All your e-mail goes into your e-mail account as normal - SpamArrest then collects the mail (in the background), filters it and then delivers messages from people you want to hear from back into your inbox where you can read them as you always did. All the rest goes into an online spam/junk folder.

This works by you simply telling SpamArrest who you want to hear from - your 'trusted list' - and adding their e-mail addresses  to your SpamArrest address book. That’s it.

If you forget someone, or a potential client, curator or buyer finds your address on the Internet, when they e-mail you, SpamArrest sends them a short message which tells them you are using a spam filter and asks them to confirm that they want to get in contact with you. They just have to click on a link. They only have to do this once and from then on all their e-mail will get through to you.

This system works because most junk e-mail is sent by robot systems to millions of addresses. If they receive a message like this, they can’t respond. If they don’t, their message isn’t delivered to your in-box. End of junk.

Just in case you do want to monitor the junk which has been filtered, you can always log into your SpamArrest account and see what is stored there. Any e-mails which have been filtered out can be authorised for delivery and get instantly placed into your inbox. You can also permanently block e-mail senders if you need to.

While I have been writing this page I've had 50 e-mails filtered out for me!!

There is an animated explanation about how it all works which you can view by clicking on the link below.

The Cost

The first 30 days are free
Then $5.95 monthly
$29.95 for 6 months (save 16%)
$49.95 for 1 year (save 30%)
$89.95 for 2 years (save 47%)

I’ve been using the 2-year option as I like the idea of saving almost half the cost, but I did go for the 1-year payment the first year, just to make sure.

The small print

To receive your 30 days free, you need to set up a test account with SpamArrest and give them your card details. You can cancel at any time within the 30-day trial and they give you a specific link to cancel on. If not, after the free trial period is over, they will convert you to a pay-monthly subscription.
Be smart - keep a note of the cancel link and mark your diary to cancel if you need to.

I know a few people working in the visual arts who use this system and have been really impressed with the quality of service. The staff are fast to respond to questions and very helpful. It might be the best few dollars you ever spend.