Alpha Geek: Keep spam off your cell phone

If you've ever tried to retrieve personal e-mail using your phone, you know how excruciating it can be. Cell phones and smartphones alike lack spam filters, so it's not uncommon to end up with 50 pieces of junk for every legitimate message. That makes for long, slow, battery-draining mail downloads and almost impossible mail management.

Indeed, most people who've been down this road decide it's not worth the hassle. That's sad, because your phone rocks as a wireless communicator. It's just hamstrung by the spam.

Fortunately, solutions exist. If you're tired of spam clogging your phone's inbox, read on to learn what you can do about it.

Stop it at the source

Traditional spam-filtering software does the heavy lifting after the fact: Once all your e-mail has been pulled off the server, the software works its magic to separate the wheat from the chaff. Alas, that's not an option for phones, which lack the processing power--and the filtering software--to perform that nifty trick. And once spam reaches your cell phone, that's it, game over. You've already invested the time (and juice) to download all that crud, and now you're faced with the obnoxious chore of purging it.

What you need is a server-based solution, a traffic cop that stops spam before it reaches your phone. Only the law-abiding mail gets through; everything else gets tossed in a virtual pokey, where you can bail it out later (or not).

Enter SpamArrest, which blocks virtually all spam using exactly that method. Specifically, it employs a challenge/response system that thwarts spam-bots while allowing live humans to successfully reach you. If someone not already on your "approved" list (which can be created automatically and updated manually) tries to e-mail you, he receives a "challenge" e-mail in return asking him to verify that he's a real person (a one-time, one-click process). Once that's done, his mail goes through, and he's never bothered again. The automated systems that flood the world with spam are unable to perform this verification process, so their junk never gets through. More....