My email’s anti-spam went kaput

FOR many years I have used 0Spam to filter my emails. In mid-October it suddenly stopped working and despite lodging several requests for help to the support section and also upgrading from "free" ($30), I have not been able to get any response. The result is that my inbox is inundated with spam every day. Do you know any way I can get some action, or alternatively, can you suggest another spam filter I could use?

Answer this week by Sean Morrison, development and online team supervisor at Aspermont Ltd.

Dealing with spam can be tricky, especially for small businesses and home users and while services like 0Spam can be useful, they all have the same problem. They are separate systems and although innovative, will never be tightly integrated with the system that actually receives your mail. So if something changes, they usually break!

It sounds like you have taken the correct steps to get a response, however, I probably wouldn’t have paid for a service you don’t really need (the $30 option is more for someone who gets A LOT of spam). If you can, try and stick with them – they have a pretty good reputation on the web and the fact it’s a free service is a big plus.

With the limited information you’ve given me I’m going to assume that “stopped working” means you are receiving your emails, however, a lot of spammy content is coming through. The first thing I’d check is the details you have on your 0Spam account.

If you’ve changed your mail account username or password, this would prevent 0Spam from checking your email. So log in to 0Spam’s website and make sure everything is correct, being careful of capitalisation etcetera. While you’re at it, ensure things like your POP3/IMAP server address are the same as the ones listed on your email provider’s website (this would be where you get your webmail).

If it’s still not working after that, or you’re unsure of what I mean by POP3/IMAP server address, get in touch with your email provider. Assuming you pay to have your email hosted you will usually have more luck getting a response from an email and/or web provider than a free anti-spam service. Tell them what you’ve written here and ask them if they can think of any reason why it would stop working.

It’s possible your mail provider has changed something on their end which is preventing 0Spam from getting access to your mail account. They should be able to check their logs and see if 0Spam is trying to get access to your mail account, if there are any errors and what actions they or you need to take to fix the problem.

Stick with it, if they worked well before then it’s probably worth a little bit of trouble to try and get the solution working again, rather than finding a new, possibly more costly, anti-spam solution.

I hope this helps!