With reports out this weekend that spam is choking up the internet, spam defence is becoming big business. On that note I thought I'd revisit a little piece of kit that I used a couple of years ago, before I went fully Gmail. The little chap is called SpamAid, and it's a very simple plug in for MS Outlook that will defend your inbox.

The program is based on Bayesian filtering technology (a very clever bloke was Mr Bayes :o) and automatically learns using your personal correspondence to increase the filtration accuracy. Quarantined e-mails are stored in a separate SPAM folder, so that you can periodically check over things being deleted, and it has the usual friends, enemies and filter lists.

Other features include an option to test outgoing mail for potential risk of being filtered as spam (a very nice addition not often found), and support for POP3, IMAP, HTTP and MS Exchange.

I would not advise that you use SpamAid as your only line of defence. Why? If your email gets on a spam list (which eventually it will) you will start receiving floods of unwanted mail. SpamAid works by filtering the email as it is downloaded on to your local machine, which means that you might still be sitting idol as the program sifts through wades of junk. I personally use a server side spam filter (namely my Gmail account) and then download from Gmail to MS Outlook with a spam plug attached. The plug in catches the rouge emails that Gmail fails to catch, but doesn't have to burn up my bandwidth dealing with the whole lot.

Moral of the story. SpamAid makes a great Outlook plug in, but don't rely on it as your only line of defence.