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Stand-Alone Utilities

Firetrust MailWasher Pro 3, , $30.

Would you rather wash your e-mail by hand, or hire someone to do it? MailWasher Pro promises to sanitize your in-box, but we had to scrub our messages manually to get all the spam out. This $30 utility is just a little too hands-on.

Like MailShield and SpamKiller, MailWasher Pro is a stand-alone program that supports a wide range of e-mail software. Unlike those other two programs, MailWasher Pro dumps both your spam and your genuine mail into a single folder, marking suspect messages as "Probably Spam" or "Possible Spam." Click the Process Mail button, and the program deletes the probable spam, adds each message's sender address to its blacklist, and sends a bounce notice (a notice claiming that the message was undeliverable) back to the spammer. You can choose from three filtering settings, create your own filters, and elect to use independently operated domain name server (DNS) blocklists to further weed out spam.

MailWasher Pro uses a heuristic system to identify spam by characteristics such as forged headers and suspicious attachments. Unfortunately, its heuristics could use some polishing. When we tested MailWasher Pro using its defaults, it deleted only 7 percent of the spam, marking another 32 percent as "Possible Spam." For our second test, we added domains from the hundreds of missed spam messages to the program's internal blacklist, told it to use DNS blocklists, and reset it to Strong spam blocking. MailWasher Pro then caught and deleted 96 percent of the junk with few false positives.

While MailWasher's final score was excellent, the results simply weren't worth the hours we had to take to create the lengthy blacklist. Product support is strictly via e-mail, and because the developer is based in New Zealand we had to wait overnight for answers. We also found the program highly unstable, experiencing several system-level crashes.

Lyris MailShield Desktop 3, , $60.

Lyris MailShield Desktop works with most e-mail clients, including POP3 and MAPI software, as well as MSN Hotmail and the paid (but not the free) Yahoo Webmail accounts. MailShield is about as good as SpamKiller in catching spam, but it wrongly tagged more legitimate messages, and at $60 it's a tad pricey.

MailShield Desktop analyzes spam using a points system: For example, it gives a message 15 points if the sender's name is missing, 138 points if the text contains the word porn. When a message gets a score of 250 or more, MailShield sends it to the Trash. You can adjust that threshold up or down, but you can't alter how the program assigns points. This means that if you receive a lot of legit HTML mail you'll get more false positives, because the program assigns a large number of points for "HTML characteristics" such as embedded photos.

Using just its default settings, MailShield caught nearly 80 percent of the spam messages in our first test. When we filtered out the spam it missed and lowered the threshold to 175 points, it nailed 98 percent of the junk. But it also marked 19 genuine messages as spam, including all of PC World's HTML newsletters.

Like MailWasher, MailShield lets you send fake nondelivery messages back to spammers so that they'll take your address off their lists, but there's no built-in way to report spammers to their ISPs. The prerelease version 3 we looked at was a tad sluggish and unstable.

Support for single users is limited to information on the Web site and three e-mail queries during the first 60 days. And at $60 for a single license, the app is too rich for most users' blood. (Lyris also sells a server version aimed at workgroup and enterprise customers.) SpamKiller gives you the same level of protection for less dough.

McAfee SpamKiller 4, , $40 download, $50 CD-ROM

The ancient (in computer years) SpamKiller is both deadly and versatile. After we trained it, the $40 program had one of the best spam-catching rates in this survey. Better yet, SpamKiller supports most POP3 or IMAP e-mail clients, as well as MSN Hotmail.

SpamKiller's install wizard scans your hard drive and imports your e-mail settings and address book with minimal prompting. Click the Check button, and SpamKiller logs on to your mail server and downloads your messages, splitting them into two folders: Killed Mail (suspected spam) and Live Mail (the rest). It works by scanning each message's header, subject, and text for telltale signs of spam (for example, the phrase absolutely free in the subject line), and it updates the filters on a weekly basis.

A preview window lets you examine each message to determine if it's truly junk. SpamKiller even shields you from the nasty stuff, blanking out the images inside HTML mail while you screen the suspect messages. When SpamKiller incorrectly files messages, you can create filters to stop future mail from a spammer or allow e-mail from a legitimate source with just a few clicks.

But you won't have to do either very often. SpamKiller whacked 84 percent of the unwanted stuff on our first test--and a whopping 98 percent after we'd trained it by creating some filters--with very few mistakes. The bad news? McAfee's phone support is expensive ($3 a minute or $39 an incident), and its free live-chat support is spotty. If you're serious about fighting spam on your desktop, SpamKiller is the best-performing package we tested. But SpamKiller is a stand-alone product--most users will still prefer the convenience of an integrated filter like IHateSpam. SpamKiller 5, due out later this year, will integrate into Outlook and could provide the best of both worlds.

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