Arizona Real Estate Notebook

A year ago I was being buried in email spam and it was destabilizing my whole operation.

I tried a zillion solutions over many months including constant fiddling with my email spam filter controls until I gave up, and using gmail for awhile to take advantage of their email spam controls.

The solution I’m personally most happy with costs money, $40 per year. I put off using it because of the cost but eventually I realized handling email inefficiently was costing me business.

Cloudmark is only available for Outlook, Outlook Express and Thunderbird. It was easy to set up and they do have a free 2 week trial.

Their concept, as I understand it, has a “wisdom of crowds” angle to it. Whenever I or anyone else using Cloudmark marks an email as spam, it counts as a vote against that email or against that sender or against something. Once Cloudmark gets enough votes against an email, it sends all such future emails directly to the spam folder. It’s sort of a human filter, not a Bayesian filter.

An important advantage for me with Cloudmark is that I’ve never had a client’s email end up in the spam folder. There’s nothing like missing a client’s email because it ended up in your spam folder to throw things off track, waste everyone’s time and make you look stupid.

I may have had an e-newsletter from a mortgage company or title company end up in the spam folder (so I “unblock” it, if I want it) but I’ve never had a client’s personal email to me end up in the spam folder.

I’ve used Cloudmark with Outlook and Thunderbird. In both cases I turned off their regular email spam filtering because of their tendency to occasionally misidentify a client’s email as spam.

I thought you might like to know.

If you’ve had success controlling email spam, I’d love to hear about it. Please leave a comment.