Spam Filters Reviews

Spam filters, also called spam blockers or anti-spam software, attempt to separate your legitimate e-mail from spam. Reviews say spam filters vary in their ability to detect and remove spam. More importantly, the products are controversial because they can falsely identify legitimate e-mail as spam (called a false positive). Reviews evaluate the accuracy and effectiveness of spam filters, along with features, ease of use and potential drain on your system resources.

Government and independent studies show spam is increasing. Barracuda Networks analyzed more than a billion e-mail messages sent to the company's customers, and found that more than 90 percent of them were spam. Scott Petry of e-mail security firm Postini says spam is evolving into new forms. It is hidden in e-mail attachments such as PDFs, MP3s, Microsoft Office documents and JPEGs. Experts also say that more spam is filtered before e-mail users ever see it. That's partly because Internet service providers are doing a better job of weeding out spam. ISPs and large companies use expensive hardware spam filters. Bill Gates says that spam filters integrated into recent Microsoft products deserve some credit for a reduction in received spam, but also credits the third-party solutions. Both are covered in this report.

We found no documentation that suggests computer users are less concerned about spam, but the quantity and quality of spam filter reviews has declined steadily in the past couple of years. Some of the most reliable reviewers, such as Consumer Reports, PC World and PC Magazine are not up-to-date in their coverage. Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com's Guide to E-mail, provides many good reviews of both free and commercial anti-spam programs. The limitation is that he doesn't conduct formal performance tests. (Note that ConsumerSearch is affiliated with About.com, but has no editorial relationship.) Almost all the reviews that show the percentage of snagged spam and false positives in formal tests are of previous versions of programs.

About.com's Tschabitscher generally rates free programs as highly as commercial anti-spam software, but he is far more impressed with MailWasher Pro 6.1 (*est. $40) than its truncated free sibling. The free version doesn't work with web-based e-mail services, nor does it use blacklist filtering or have learning capability. Tschabitscher rates nine programs over SpamExperts Desktop 1.2, another free alternative. It has several weaknesses, including slow processing and filtering of e-mail.  ... Continued

Our Consensus Report shows how many times products are top-ranked by reviewers included in our
All The Reviews Reviewed chart.

# of Picks	Model (With Retailer Links)	Details from Amazon.com
3	POPFile 1.0.0 (free)	-
2	MailWasher Pro 6.1 (*est. $40)	-
2	Cloudmark Desktop 5.3/3.2.2 (*est. $40)	-
2	Allume SpamCatcher 4.0 (*est. $30)	details
1 each	ClearMyMail, Death2Spam, Ella for Spam Control, eXpurgate, MailWasher (free), Sendio, Spam Cube, Spam Arrest, SpamBayes, SPAMfighter Pro v6, Spamihilator 0.9.9.37, SpamSieve, Windows Mail Junk Filter , OnlyMyEmail, Vanquish vqME, CA Anti-Spam

Due to a dearth of reviews in the past couple of years, we found few recommendations for current versions of many programs. MailWasher Pro and Cloudmark Desktop have been favorites of reviewers for years, and continue to receive the most favorable reviews. The two programs aren't similar. Cloudmark is a community-based filter; it screens e-mail identified as spam by its large community of users. MailWasher uses all the other methods of filtering.

POPFile is clearly the favorite free program of reviews. They site reasons why it isn't for everybody. Its Bayesian filter requires a time commitment to train. It's more complex to use than the best commercial programs, and support is limited to other users. There have been no reviews yet of the very latest version, but CA Anti-Spam is most highly regarded whitelist filter, though it is not without its detractors. OnlyMyEmail continues as the top rated web-based spam filter despite a price increase.