Spam Sandwich
Why a sandwich? because the spam is nicely squished between all my machines. Your spam tools can be ineffective without the proper setup when using multiple machines. This is because you will check your email with one machine in the morning and be in a clients office on your laptop and the rules you set on your desktop that very morning will not be effective on your laptop. Sound familiar to anyone? or maybe you have two machines with different operating systems and you run two different spam filters; well here is your solution. Head over to http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ and download Spambayes. They do have an outlook plugin you can use, but that will not solve the problem I described above. If you use Outlook and you do not check email on multiple systems the plugin will be perfect.
The reason Spambayes is so great, aside from its spectacular spam detection, is the ability to use it as a proxy. When installed you have a full web interface to admin your spam. This interface lets you control the detection thresholds, database storage, and a number of other features. In my situation I have setup Spambayes on my laptop and I have configured my mail clients to use it as their mail server. When I connect to the mail server Spambayes handles everything for me and looks at all the mail incoming or outgoing mail. You have the option to filter upon arrival, which in my opinion does not work as well as the outlook plugin does, but it does work. If you set it to filter upon arrival you must remember to go through the web interface and use their training interface so that future mail will be filtered correctly and you must set a filter in your mail client to read a specific header added to your email marking it as spam.
With everything setup I can access mail from my desktop when at the house and my laptop when on the road and I do not have to worry about my spam being filtered incorrectly. If I access mail on my laptop I usually close my mail client when I get home and open the mailbox file on my desktop client to synchronize my mail.
The other nice thing is that you tell it to keep cache for X number of days and in the web interface you can search through your mail and retrieve copies of mail you may have deleted. I have used this feature a couple times just this month.
