Spam has to be the biggest threat to computers since virus's started doing the rounds, most spam is pretty harmless, its just sales people trying to get you to buy their products. But other spam is harmful as they contain virus's or install programs onto your computer to monitor your activities and not to mention peeing you off.

Normally if you have a website you are bound to get tons of spam, more so if you have a catch all email account. Spam bots hunt around the web, find your domain name and then use it to send annoying spam emails to you or other people.

Cloudmark is a solution to combat these problems and it works on the email desktop client level and is compatible with Outlook + Exchange accounts, MSN/Hotmail using Http or POP3, Yahoo Mail Plus using POP3, SSL POP3 and Outlook Express. It provides anti-spam, anti-phishing (emails that try and scam your account details from you by pretending to be a valid company when in fact they are not) and stops email-borne viruses before they infect your computer.

As mentioned earlier the Cloudmark service is user driven, each subscriber to the Cloudmark service (prices mentioned later) is linked to a central server, each time you detect a spam email and block it this email is then flagged up as spam on all the other million users connected to the system - in real time.

Installation is easy and once installed you will see a new toolbar appear in your chosen email client. You can then get Cloudmark to automatically detect (using its vast database) and move Spam to a folder or configure the service to delete the spam instantly. You also have the option to unblock emails that you have flagged as spam or add trusted email accounts to not be blocked - just in case the email was from a legit source.

If you detect a spam/phish email you simply click on the email and then on 'block'. It then moves or deletes the email (based on your configuration) and sends the results up to the Cloudmark server to stop the same email from getting through to any other subscribers.

After a while you start to get a rating based on the number of spam emails blocked, to show how efficient you are of blocking emails. The higher the rating the more influence you have on the Cloudmark network.

We found the service to be pretty efficient, it did not slow our Outlook down and though we had anti-spam protection on our server it still caught some that it missed. Plus it saves us the hassle of having to manually block the darn spam emails from our server in the first place.

Prices for Cloudmark desktop start from $39.95 a year for two computers, which works out to arround £20 a year and is well worth the money for the protection it offers. The price for a subscription also includes all updates for free.