Rating: 11 anti-spam tools

Today, many email clients and services provide built-in anti-spam tools, such as Yahoo! Emails, Hotmail, and Microsoft Outlook 2003. In fact, the Built-in anti-spam functions of some products (especially Hotmail and Oddpost) seem to be no worse than some specialized anti-spam tools. However, what if the email client you are using does not have a valid anti-spam filter? It is estimated that by next year, the proportion of spam in all emails will exceed 70%. In this case, the necessity of installing professional anti-spam tools becomes more and more prominent.

11 anti-spam tools were evaluated in this topic. Eight of them depend heavily on the complex technology of separating spam from normal emails. Generally, batch emails that are not sent by yourself are very different from those of daily emails. These anti-spam tools strive to find these differences. When testing these applications, we used an email account in PC Magazine to receive daily emails from readers (and, of course, a large number of spam emails ). We re-allocate the email for this account to eight identical user accounts, so we can use the same email for testing.

Some of these anti-spam tools allow you to train filter rules. We trained filter rules in a few days: in hundreds of emails, we pointed out which are spam and which are not spam. After this process, we waited until we received nearly 500 new emails before the formal test began. We let every tool program process the same email to test their ability to distinguish normal and spam (we determine spam. However, it should be noted that the White List, blacklist, or question/answer technology is not used to test their spam resolution capabilities. For test results, see the score table. "No spam is intercepted" indicates the proportion of spam mails that have escaped the filter of the anti-spam program and entered the inbox. Blocking a legitimate email indicates a false positive rate. Misjudgment means that normal mail errors are treated as spam, which is worse than missing spam emails in the inbox.

The other three tools used in this evaluation use the whitelist technology. These tools record a list in which the email addresses are allowed to be received. The whitelist is the main method to filter received emails. If someone in the whitelist sends you an email, the email enters your inbox. If the sender is not in this list, the email will be questioned or blocked to another specific email address.

The above filter revision process is not required for whitelist products. This type of anti-spam products determine which emails are allowed and which emails are blocked manually. The difference between different products is to build an authenticated sender list to check the convenience of important emails from unknown sources.

Filter Products

Filter-based anti-spam applications can prohibit spam from entering the inbox by checking the mail header and content.

IHateSpam

Sunbelt Software, developer of iHateSpam, still fails to solve the false positive rate problem. When we evaluated iHateSpam last spring, it was one of the products with the highest false positive rate. It has not improved much in this evaluation: almost 20% of normal emails were misjudged as spam.

To be fair, iHateSpam blocks a considerable number of spam messages. 400 of the more than 91% spam mails sent in our test can be correctly identified. In iHateSpam, you can easily set traditional whitelists and blacklists, and customize filters to block emails containing specific words or phrases, you can even customize the filter to receive emails containing specific words or phrases.

Sunbelt provides two versions of iHateSpam: one for Outlook Express and the other for Outlook. The latter can process IMAP and Exchange accounts, both of which are easy to use. In addition, a striking feature is iHateSpam's Hotmail integration. Among the anti-spam products we have seen on the Hotmail Web interface, iHateSpam is one of the best products. All products except SpamKiller evaluated in this evaluation can only run in Outlook or Outlook Express. We especially like that after installing iHateSpam, there will be a wizard to help you configure the sensitivity of the filter.

IHateSpam has five different sensitivity settings. We use the default Medium setting during testing. Considering the high false positive rate of this application, you should select one of the two low-sensitivity settings at the beginning.

Direct Selling Price: USD 19.95.

Sunbelt Software USA, www.sunbelt-software.com. Overall Evaluation:★★☆☆☆

Matador's inquiry system automatically intercepts Spam

MailFrontier Matador

If you have been paying attention to the anti-spam war, you may have heard of MailFrontier Matador and its inquiry emails. By configuring this application, you can enable it to automatically send an email to an unknown sender, asking the recipient to answer the number of small animals in the sent digital image. If the recipient's answer is correct (in theory, the automatic mail program cannot answer), the sender will be added to the White List. In fact, the inquiry email is only a small part of Matador. If you are worried that the inquiry email will cause troubles to your friends or colleagues, or you are worried about losing the normal business email you actually need to receive, you can also disable the question email function. In addition to querying emails, Matador can also block spam through email analysis.

Matador is similar to Cloudmark's SpamNet, which adjusts filter rules by collecting data from its user base. This application adds two buttons to each user's email client. You can point out the emails that you think are spam. However, Matador does not force you to rely too much on others' opinions: You can lower the level of the collaborative filter and carefully customize your own mail filter. Matador provides you with six controls for managing filter rules.

When testing the Matador Email Filtering Function in PC Lab, this application always has some minor problems in the aspect of misjudgment. This time, Matador is more serious: it mistakenly blocks 14% of normal emails. In addition, it has spared more spam: 20% of spam have escaped its filter. However, this does not mean that Matador is not worth considering. We still like its powerful and easy-to-use interface. If more improvements are made to Matador, the performance of Matador may be improved.

Direct Selling Price: USD 29.95.

MailFrontier, www.mailfrontier.com. Overall Evaluation:★★☆☆☆

Mailcycler Pro

Firetrust's mailcycler Pro has the same problem as DigiPortal's famous white list product ChoiceMail: it cannot be integrated with users' mail clients, it can only reside in a completely independent window (actually the second inbox ). More importantly, this product did not do well in tests: it was the product that caught the least spam in this evaluation, and its false positive rate also reached a regrettable 16%.

Programs like Norton AntiSpam and Qurb are tightly integrated with Outlook, and isolated emails are placed on your email client, which is easy to view. However, if you do not switch to another window, you cannot view (or process) the emails that are isolated. The only advantage of mailcycler is that it is applicable to almost any POP3, IMAP, AOL, or Hotmail account. However, mailcycler cannot process Exchage accounts. In addition, we also hope that the installation process of mailreceiver will be simpler. During the installation process, you must manually enter the email server and user name. However, mailcycler does have the following advantages: you can create your own email filter. You can add the entire domain to the whitelist or blacklist. In addition, if you are willing to launch some "counterattack" actions (although this does not necessarily work), you can also bounce the Spam back to its source.

Direct Selling Price: USD 29.95.

Firetrust Ltd., www.firetrust.com. Overall Evaluation:★★☆☆Mcafee

SpamKiller

If you have been using McAfee products, including virus scanning tools and personal firewalls, SpamKiller is also worth studying. Like other McAfee applications, SpamKiller is integrated into its unified and regular user interface, namely, SecurityCenter. However, we do not recommend using this product after testing. First, it is not closely integrated with the mail client as we expect: You must check the mail folder through a separate window. This reduces the efficiency. When you open the folder, the program will take a few seconds to open the mail content. Its biggest drawback is that it only blocks 64 of spam and the false positive rate is as high as 50, which is unacceptable. The advantage of SpamKiller is that it not only supports POP3, but also integrates Hotmail and Exchange accounts. It provides a large number of tools for customizing the anti-spam mechanism. The process of adding a whitelist or blacklist is simple. You can view and edit independent folders and set different configurations for different email addresses on the same machine.

Direct Selling Price: USD 34.95/year.

Mda1_security. Www.mcafee.com. Overall Evaluation:★☆☆☆☆

Norton AntiSpam 2004
　
Let's have a drink for the birth of Symantec Norton AntiSpam 2004. This application can be obtained in the Norton Network Security Special Police 2004 suite. Norton AntiSpam 2004 is Symantec's first independent product in the Anti-Spam market. In terms of capturing spam, it is more effective than any other independent tool involved in the test. Norton AntiSpam 2004 provides many custom filter tools. This product is only applicable to POP3 clients. IMAP, Exchange, and Hotmai users cannot use this product.

In Norton AntiSpam 2004, you can easily create a whitelist and blacklist. You can create your own filter to tell the program to block all emails containing specific words or phrases. In addition, by adding two buttons to the email client, you can also guide its Bayesian engine to identify the emails you think are spam. After guidance, we found in our lab tests that Norton AntiSpam 2004 blocked 93% of spam mails, and the normal mail that misjudges was only 3%.

Although the sensitivity of the application's filter engine can be adjusted, you only have three options: low, medium, and high. In the test, we use the default moderate level. Symantec also works with this product