Do you use a spam blocker email program?

I've never really considered it in the past but now I'm at the point where my personal correspondence Verizon email account now receives spam to legit email at probably a 4:1 ratio. I use a program called "First checker" to check the email where I can then delete unwanted email from the server before downloading and then use Eudora to download the email to my pc. But sometimes between the process of checking the email first and then downloading the legit email, more spam is received and gets thru. So I'm investigating what spam blocker email programs are available and wondered what cpf members used.

I use Mailwasher Pro and like it.
Norm

Great topic. I was thinking about posting this today myself.

thunderbird is the only way to go!

very stable... been using since beta. Never crashed.
intelligent spam filter system. learns what's spam from your flagging.
very few false positives.

after baylean filter learns... don't ever bother to double check mail labeled as spam. they go directly to trash.

I get 200-500+ spam per day, due to my email address being 8+ years old. spammers love to use internic registration address, due to fact they have to be valid.

A recent thread on this topic has some helpful suggestions:

http://candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?t=145946

The most recent post there was only a few days ago, Jan 8th.

From what I've researched thus far, I like the mail washer system. I would rather identify and treat the spam at the server level and get rid of it before it ever reaches my machine.

I installed Spam Assassin after an onslaught of spam to my work e-mail account (and that's after server filters, etc). The software "learns" what is spam and deals with it accordingly. It took a couple of days (literally) for it to learn what the incoming spam looks like, and now it catches everything. The places the few e-mails the software is unsure about in a "suspects" folder and I can manually deal with them (while the software "learns" more). I'm down to about 2-3 "suspects" a week now, and so far not a single instance where a real e-mail has been placed on watch.