If you’d like to find a good proxy server to keep you anonymous online then there are plenty of online sources which claim they can help. These lists aren’t always reliable, though – some recommended servers may not work any more, others aren’t as anonymous as you might think – and you can spend quite some time manually checking their various suggestions before you find anything that suits your needs.

If all that sounds too much like hard work, then, you might prefer to use the free A+ Proxy Finder, which automates the process of locating and evaluating HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS proxies.

Launch the program, click Start, and it’ll automatically download lists of proxies from multiple sources, displaying them all in a table. On our test run this uncovered more than 2,000 servers right away.

Check the score on the right for each proxy's anonymity rating: the higher, the better

Next, A+ Proxy Finder begins to check each one. Servers which appear to be down are greyed out, so you don’t waste any time on them, and the program will determine the server type, host name, and country of origin for everything else.

And perhaps best of all, A+ Proxy Finder even runs multiple tests to rate each proxy for anonymity, sorting the list accordingly so it’s easy to see your best options.

This can of course take a while, particularly when there are thousands of servers to be checked, so you’ll need to be patient on the program’s first run.

In future, though, you might try increasing its maximum number of “verification connections”. A+ Proxy Finder can check up to 500 servers simultaneously, if your system and internet connection are up to it, and that will make a real difference to performance.

And there are many other configuration options which can help. Once you’ve built up a core list of servers which you know are active most of the time, for instance, you can have the program verify only those, ignoring its web sources entirely.

Put it all together and A+ Proxy Finder is a comprehensive and capable tool, then, and an excellent way to more quickly locate working and effective proxies.