Spam Filtering Review - E-Mail Security
Spam is very time consuming at the very least, forcing users to work out which e-mail’s in their inbox are valid and which are spam. Therefore spam slows down end user productivity and fills up the inbox very quickly.
At the very worst spam e-mails can contain viruses and other malware causing theft of confidential data, system failure, and this can spread across your business network infecting all networked computers.
Below I have my recommendation on a spam filtering product in particular that I know and rate highly when it comes to stopping spam. As a matter of fact I have used a fair few spam filters, and the below perform as amongst the best out there, for the matter of simplicity, the effectiveness in stopping spam, and causing the least false positives
Spamfighter Pro
Spamfighter Pro spam blocker is a Microsoft gold certified partner and so works exceptionally well with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail.
Spam Fighter Pro spam blocker can also stop spam in other languages. You can blacklist domains and e-mails, and can perform manual and automatic whitelisting. Upon startup Spam fighter spam blocker will automatically whitelist contacts within your address book.
When installed it will filter all incoming e-mail and installs a toolbar so you can block or unblock e-mail messages, and whitelist or blacklist their senders.
Spamfighter spam blocker is similar to other spam blockers in the fact that it is a community-based anti spam filtering products, and integrate a toolbar within outlook as shown above.
In Spamfighter spam blocker the blacklist and whitelist feature will override community based filtering. When installed it imports your contacts into it’s whitelist at start-up, and on demand. It will also import the blocked senders list from your e-mail client into the blacklist.
Further looking into Spamfighter spam blocker, you can hit the settings tab from the toolbar which opens a dialogue with further settings to tweak. In particular the language recognition feature is nice to have, only allowing e-mails in your language to filter through, or you can customise which ones to block.
When testing spamfighter spam blocker, it was very fast and responsive and did block almost all spam e-mail letting a couple through, although it did not block any of my valid e-mails and so not producing false positives. I would say Spamfighter spam blocker would block 97% plus of e-mail, which comparing to it’s competition is excellent. Again my test was on 500 e-mails, in which 30 were legitimate and 170 were spam e-mails.
Spamfighter spam blocker will run on Windows 2000 right through to Win 7 ! E-mail clients it is compatible with are Outlook 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007 and 2010 (32bit). Outlook Express 5.5 (And later)
Windows Mail (32 bit) and Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0, 3.0 and 3.1.
Further Reading
Wikipedia's guide to Spam