Although Cloudmark has done a great job for me, I was getting irritated by the delay inherent in using it. It’s not the product’s fault, it’s just that it works client side – so all the mail has to be downloaded to your PC before it works. That might be fine if your PC is connected all the time, but I generally only connect a couple of times a day and downloading 200 messages of which only 20 were really for me isn’t my idea of being productive. Plus, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a blackberry now that you don’t need server-side software and paying by the megabyte for spam seems daft.
So, I’ve moved my mail to runbox (anyone who emails me might therefore get mail back from me at runbox, although the old mail address works – runbox collects from it regularly). Runbox has a built in spam filter that stopped 187 messages from hitting inbox in the last 72 hours and it seems to be rarely fallible (for now at least). Worth looking at it if you are tired of spam – it’s about $30/year for peace of (parts of your) mind.