Spam Blocker Reviews - Mail Security Spam
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.
At the very worst spam e-mails can contain viruses and other malware, causing theft of confidential data, system failure, and could spread across your business network infecting all networked computers.
Below I have recommended two spam blocker products 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 blockers, and the two below perform as amongst the best out there, for the matter of simplicity, the effectiveness in stopping spam, and causing the least false positives
Ihatespam
Ihatespam is a spam blocker created for Microsoft Outlook, owned and maintained by Sunbelt Software who are a providers in windows security software.
If your looking for a spam blocker which is very easy to use and does an excellent job in filtering spam, produces very little false positives if any, then I would recommend Ihatespam spam blocker.
Ihatespam spam blocker works using a community-based filtering mechanism. How community-based filtering works is if a user receives a spam message and mark's this as a spam message, the report is sent back to the Ihatespam server. When Ihatespam are satisfied they have a sufficient number of users marking a particular e-mail as spam, they would then create a signature for this spam message and in future no one would receive the spam e-mail.
If the community mark an e-mail as spam, then the mail will be considered. Individuals themselves can not impact on a final decision. Within the Community-based filtering all users have a rating which has proved to be very effective. When a user marks an e-mail as spam, in which other users mark the same particular mail as spam as well, then the user's rating goes up and in future Ihatespam spam blocker considers their feedback with greater significance. However if a user is marking spam mail as valid, and other users are disagreeing, then their ratings will take a negative effect. So you can clearly see why this system works well, as spammers themselves can not fool the system. As well as this, because the community is over a million users big really explains another reason as to why the system and the Ihatespam spam blocker works so well.
Suspicious spam like e-mail is placed in a spam quarantine folder within outlook or outlook express. Ihatespam spam blocker first analysis if an e-mail is spam before using the community system. Ihatespam spam blocker uses basic algorithms such as bayesian for analysing spam like e-mails.
When installed, Ihatespam spam blocker places a toolbar within your Microsoft Outlook application and so unlike some other products the Ihatespam spam blocker application is tightly integrated. Therefore you would not have to open up separate applications. On the toolbar you can select the "Is Spam" button to mark e-mails as spam, access and edit your whitelist and black lists. There are also more options with various settings such as your Exchange server settings, parental control, preferences to the way Ihatespam spam blocker features work, etc, within the Ihatespam spam blocker options tab.
You can whitelist senders specifying domains as well as individual e-mail addresses. The same goes for blacklisting as well.
Ihatespam spam blocker also analyses your address book in which all your contacts would be put into the friends list. In other words it’s a whitelist of e-mail addresses. Ihatespam spam blocker also monitors e-mail's you have sent, though not classifying your recipients as spam if they were to send you an e-mail back.
If an e-mail is marked as spam, you can use the "Not spam" tab on your toolbar when viewing your e-mail within the quarantine area and in future the mail will be not classified as spam. For this matter, spam is quarantined until you delete so your not going to loose any e-mails. Ihatespam spam blocker analyses the e-mails before they get to your inbox, and so not affecting performance.
When you open your e-mail client, Ihatespam spam blocker checks its e-mail signatures, and updates automatically if needed. With the purchase you get one year free anti-spam updates, and from then on you can renew every year.
Testing Ihatespam, it did stop all spam e-mail and not mark any valid e-mail as spam, and so did not produce false positives. My test was on 200 e-mails, in which 30 were legitimate and 170 were spam e-mails.
In a nutshell Ihatespam spam blocker is a community-based spam filter, which is very effective in catching spam, and extremely low on false positives. Ihatespam spam blocker is amongst the best out there comparing the spam blocker software to its competition, and stops around 96 to 99 percent of spam, which I consider as excellent. Although the only downside to Ihatespam spam blocker is there is no support for any other clients other than Outlook and Outlook Express at the moment.
Product Requirements
Ihatespam spam blocker 5.0 supports Microsoft Outlook 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007
Protocols supported are POP3, IMAP, MAPI Exchange.
Ihatespam spam blocker 4.0 supports Outlook Express only, from version Windows 98 to Windows XP
Ihatespam spam blocker will be expanding on the above to support other clients as well in the near future.
Buy IHateSpam
Spamfighter Pro
Spamfighter spam blocker is a Microsoft gold certified partner and so works exceptionally well with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail. Again Spamfighter spam blocker is another community-based spam filter.
This is another solid spam blocker product. 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 Ihatespam spam blocker in the fact that they are both community-based anti spam filtering products, and integrate a toolbar within outlook as shown above. Within the context of community based filtering, Spamfighter spam blocker does not have a user rating system like Ihatespam spam blocker, although this does not seem to have a negative affect to spamfighter spam blocker, and still manages to block spam just as good as the Ihatespam spam blocker software.
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 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 95% plus of e-mail, which comparing to it’s competition is very good. Again my test was on 200 e-mails, in which 30 were legitimate and 170 were spam e-mails.
Spamfighter spam blocker will run on Windows 98 right through to Vista ! E-mail clients it is compatible with are Outlook 2000, 2002, 2003, 2007, Outlook Express or later and Windows Mail.
There are two version. With the standard edition;
You are not licensed to use for business,
You get advertisements and Spamfighter spam blocker footer with all your outgoing e-mails,
you can not block spam in other languages,
Your not supported if anything goes wrong,
You can not move the toolbar within Outlook and limited to 100 blacklisting and whitelisting domains.
With the Pro version you get the lot, as well as telephone support and free upgrades throughout the year until you renewal is due again.
Conclusion to both spam blocker products
Ihatespam spam blocker anti-spam product performed a notch better than than spamfighter spam blocker, although only by a tiny fraction. Both these spam blocker software products are on level par with each other and produce excellent results, bearing in mind there is no spam blocker product in the world that can stop a 100% spam, and create no false positives. I in particular know of this due to working with high enterprise spam blocker products, from big vendors such as Barracuda and Clearswift spam blocker solutions. Even those dedicated spam blocker software products do not perform to a 100%, as with any.
Buy Spamfighter Pro