Product Guide: Spam fighters

Anyone who has launched an e-mail client to discover a glut of offers for dubious nostrums, bogus diplomas, and indelicate physical congress is well aware that spam - the junk mail that fills our inboxes in ever increasing amounts - is a huge problem.

The U.S. federal and state governments have made some efforts to curb the proliferation of spam, but these have been diluted by competing interests concerned with preserving and promoting free speech and allowing marketers to reach potential customers. Even the toughest antispam laws do little to stem the tide of spam--particularly spam that originates overseas, where American law holds no sway. ISPs have also stepped up efforts to snare the spam that slithers through their gateways, but these efforts are ineffective in most cases.

We looked at seven spam utilities:

1. Hendrickson Software Components' EmailCRX 1.6.2
2. Firetrust Limited's MailWasher Pro 1.1.3
3. Intego's Personal Antispam X4 (10.4.2)
4. Matterform Media's Spamfire 2.3
5. C-Command's SpamSieve 2.6.1
6. Bains Software's SpamSweep 1.5.3
7. JLS/JLSDevelopment's SpamX 3.0.2

We examined each utility's interface, ease of use, and mode of operation, and made some general judgments about its comparative effectiveness at eliminating spam--we say "general" because good spam filters get better with time and adapt to spam's changing nature. We then fed each program the same bucket of junk, to see how it dealt with some egregious forms of spam, right out of the box. In addition, we considered the following key questions:

1. Is the software easy to install and configure?
2. Which e-mail clients does it support?
3. Which e-mail systems does it support (POP, IMAP, or both)?
4. Does it deal with spam locally or remotely?
5. >Does it support a variety of spam-fighting techniques?
6. Is it easy to train (or is training unnecessary)?
7. Does it adapt to new forms of spam?
8. How configurable is it?
9. Are there hidden costs (such as paid subscription updates)?

Technology and techniques

These utilities interact with your e-mail client in different ways and use a variety of techniques for separating good messages from spam.

EmailCRX, MailWasher Pro, Spamfire, and SpamSweep download your incoming messages (or enough of each message to judge its content) and then filter and rate them. Once you've verified your mail, these utilities can delete the spam from the server and send the good messages to your e-mail client. EmailCRX and Spamfire act as proxy servers for your e-mail client; this means that when you ask your e-mail client to download your mail, it passes that task along to the spam catcher--which retrieves your good messages and passes them along--rather than going to your ISP's POP server.

While Personal Antispam X4 and SpamSieve are each full-fledged programs, they're integrated into your e-mail program. All your messages are delivered to your e-mail client; as they arrive, these utilities sort them into your inbox or into a spam folder, depending on their contents.

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