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Natural-Born Spam Killers

Six top utilities promise relief from the junk-mail onslaught. Our tests reveal the best defenders for your in-box.

Daniel Tynan

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Everybody gets too much spam, and nobody likes it. But you don't have to eat any of it. Invest $20 to $60 and some training time in an antispam utility, and you can enjoy a nearly spam-free diet.

We put six leading spam fighters through our torture test and found that, after some customization, the best filtering software can keep at least 90 percent of the junk you receive out of your in-box. A good filtering program lets you easily correct its mistakes and updates itself automatically as spammers develop new tricks to beat the latest filtering techniques. Finding the right utility can be tough, however--the choice depends heavily on which e-mail client you use to check your messages.

In general, we preferred tools like Cloudmark SpamNet, Sunbelt Software's IHateSpam, and Spamnix, which integrate directly into e-mail clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express, and Eudora. Stand-alone products such as Firetrust MailWasher Pro, Lyris MailShield, and McAfee SpamKiller support a much wider range of e-mail clients, but using them requires more work. The stand-alone programs check your messages and winnow spam out before you launch your e-mail application. Integrated utilities--like our Best Buy, IHateSpam 3.2 for Outlook--filter the spam from inside your e-mail client, which saves you a step.

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