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While email is a wonderful invention, it allows us to keep in touch with family and friends for easily, quickly, and cheaply, it has one annoying feature – spam!  How many times have you had to weed through messages from a Nigerian prince wanted to give you money for helping him or emails about free $500 Best Buy gift certificates to get to the emails you really want to read?  Spam emails not only clog up the Internet airways, but may also cause you to miss an important email.  There are companies that provide spam filters, but most people find that that helps little, if at all.  What is the solution to getting rid of spam email?  SpamArrest!

SpamArrest allows you to take control of your inbox, deciding the mail that makes it to your inbox and the mail that doesn’t.  How does SpamArrest work?  First, when you sign up, you will receive a new email address that ends in spamarrest.com.  But do not worry; you do not have to give your family and friends a new email address.  You can simply forward your existing email accounts to the new SpamArrest account or have SpamArrest check them every so often for mail.  Anything that is not spam is placed in the SpamArrest inbox, which you can access using any POP3 or IMAP client, such as Outlook or Eudora. You can even use a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox to access your SpamArrest email account through their webmail system.

To keep the spam out of this new inbox, you tell SpamArrest what email to place in your inbox.  It can be a specific email address, a domain, or a mailing list if you subscribe to a forum.  You have access to a disposable email sub-address, which means you can receive messages from people you do not know without them having access to see your real email address.

When an unknown email comes into the SpamArrest system, it uses Challenge/Response technology to remove any spam.  If an email is received from someone not on your list, SpamArrest sends out an auto-reply message.  The person who sent the unknown email is then asked to click on a link, which takes them to a webpage where they are “challenged” to type in a word that is hidden within a graphic.  If this user successfully types in the hidden word, their message is sent to your inbox.  While this type of Challenge/Response technology is easy for people to do, it is almost impossible for spambots, the automated systems that send out spam at alarming rates, to complete.

If the person who sent the email does not verify it, it sits in your unverified folder for seven days.  You can log in and approve anyone you wish at any time during that seven-day period.  This means even if you have technologically challenged friends, you can still approve for their emails to enter your inbox.

Click here to see it in action.

SpamArrest is a quick and easy way to filter out unwanted spam email.  You can try it for free for 30 days.  If you decide to subscribe, rates start as low as $3.12 a month – a small price to pay for something that saves you time by deleting all the spam for you.  I stand by what is said here because I use it and would never go back.

If you recently bought an Xbox 360, you may be interested to know many users are complaining of various problems due to defective design.  In fact, one user was so unhappy; he has brought a $5,000,000 class action lawsuit against Microsoft this week.

The lawsuit against Microsoft claims the company’s Xbox 360 was “negligently designed and manufactured.”  Many users believe the Xbox 360 has a problem with scratched optical discs.  Some blame this on users shifting the position of the Xbox while it is in use, but others say that the optical disc is scratched even when it is just sitting there.  Others have had game discs so scratched that they can no longer use them.  This is especially unacceptable for a gaming system in which the game discs can cost as much as $50 or more.  Microsoft has replaced some game discs made by them at $20 each, but make no compensation for game discs made by third parties.

In addition to the optical disc problem, many users have issues with a software update causing problems.  This update, issued October 31, 2006 was supposed to fix a defect.  What it actually does, says many users, is causes the game to freeze up after installation and while playing games on the Xbox 360.  This freezing action has caused some Xboxes to no longer function after installing the update.  It is not merely a matter of not installing the download, as some users say that when they connect to Microsoft’s “Xbox Live,” they automatically receive the update.

This latest lawsuit adds to the woes experience by Microsoft over the Xbox 360.  Last December, Microsoft was sued by an Illinois family. The family claimed their Xbox 360 overheated and caused a fire, killing an infant in the home.  The lawsuit claims the fire was “was a direct and proximate result of the overheating of the game’s power supply and wiring.”  However, the lawsuit claims the fire occurred in December 2004, five months before the official launch of the Xbox 360 in May 2005, so the console may have been a first generation Xbox.

Microsoft went from denying there was a problem with the Xbox 360 to admitting that there was a problem that could affect up the almost 12 million consoles sold so far.  So what does Microsoft plan to do about the problem?  They have announced a plan to set aside between $1.05 and $1.15 billion to extend the warranty of all Xbox 360s from one year to three years.  In their plans, they also promise to fix all Xbox 360s that display the dreaded “red ring of death.”  This occurs when the three front panel lights light up, indicating a general hardware failure has occurred.  This works out to Microsoft setting aside almost $100 for each console sold.

What may hurt Microsoft more than any monetary amount they will lose is the loss in faith and confident in their gaming consoles.  They originally insisted that the failure rate – between 3% and 5% - was average for a gaming console.  It turns out that the failure rate may actually be five times that.  If they plan to save face, they may need to make some drastic changes in the design of the Xbox 360 to prevent future problems and lawsuits.