Say No to Spam
Spam happens. Named after Hormel's celebrated "chopped pork shoulder
meat," digital spam is unsolicited, unwanted e-mail.
How do spammers find you? You leave your e-mail address in a
surprising number of places. If you register at a Web site, for instance, the
site may in turn send you mail about new products and services--or sell your
address to a marketing firm. (Some sites let you choose not to receive e-mail
advertisements, but it's easy to miss that little checkbox during
registration.)
If you're sick of spam, fight back. Some e-mail clients and packages
(such as Eudora, Outlook, and America Online) include special antispam filters,
but third-party apps permit greater customizing. Most clients' filters combine
the words most frequently used in spam mail subject headers (free, get rich
quick, XXX, sex) with the addresses of notorious spammers. Good antispam
software enhances this protection by letting you add information. For example,
some products give you the option of setting up your own list of addresses to
block or allow.
In our test, we set up a dummy e-mail account, installed eight
filtering programs separately, and sent ourselves ten typical spam messages
(such as "Do you need more money?"). We found that many add-on antispam
utilities were ineffective--and most of them don't work on proprietary,
non-Internet-standard e-mail programs like AOL and Lotus Notes--but we
found two we liked a lot: Webster Image's SpamScan97 and Contact Plus's Spam
Buster 1.4.
SpamScan97 put our spam in the fryer: It caught every junk message
we sent its way--and it was the easiest antispam product to set up and use.
SpamScan97 comes with a list of spam keywords and forbidden domains, to which
you can add friendly or forbidden addresses and spam hot words of your own.
Afraid of barring a legitimate message? You can set filters to specify when to
reject a message outright and when to make exceptions.
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Like SpamScan97, Spam Buster resolutely stonewalled all our test
e-mails. It can scan your e-mail messages before you open your mail program, or
you can opt to launch your mail directly from Spam Buster after it cleans out
the unwanted messages. It relies on a list of about 15,000 known spam mailers,
which you can modify with your own parameters and update for free via the
company's Web site (once you register). Unfortunately, novices may have trouble
finding some functions in Spam Buster's confusing interface.
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This plug-in for Eudora and Microsoft Outlook 97 caught all our
slabs of test spam, but it's too tentative for our tastes. Instead of
automatically deleting suspected spam messages, it stores them in a separate
folder, where you have to review the messages and manually chuck them. Though
this method ensures that only truly unwanted mail gets deleted, it takes too
much time.
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Sad to say, SpamKiller 1.61 isn't as ruthless as its name
suggests. It uses built-in rules (and any you add) to decide whether to mark
messages for future removal or trash them outright. But SpamKiller rarely
pulled the trigger on even the most obvious spams. Of our ten test messages it
caught only three--and those it merely marked, forcing us to do the dirty work
ourselves.
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Spam Exterminator 3.2 boasts a huge list of known spammers'
addresses--17,500--and you can get more with regular Web updates. Too bad it
caught only three of our ten test messages. On top of that, it was
time-consuming to set up, because of its multiple buttons and tabs.
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Spam Exterminator 3.2; 1.5MB;
sxsetup.exe
$28 shareware
Unisyn Software
www.unisyn.com
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SpammerSlammer doesn't automatically delete junk messages. Heck,
it doesn't even incarcerate them. Instead, it tags suspect dispatches with
wishy-washy labels and makes you decide whether to whack them sight unseen or
read the gory details first. Unjust or not, we've got better things to do than
review the X-rated e-mails that this utility flags as "maybe" or "most likely."
And SpammerSlammer caught only two of our ten test spams. 'Nuff said.
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EFilter 2.0 crashed our PC during our first attempt at
installation, and gave us an arcane error message the second time around. When
we finally got it going, it missed nine of our ten e-garbage missives. You
can't argue with the price; still, we'd prefer to download elsewhere.
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EFilter 2.0; filt262.exe; 2.64MB
freeware (Pro version $12)
TSW
www.eflash.com
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Spam Hater may detest spam, but it doesn't translate opinion into
action very well. In fact, it doesn't block spam at all--rather, it analyzes
mail headers and issues complaints to the specified return address. But
responding to spams--even opening them--confirms your e-mail address, freeing
the spammer to keep on spamming you.
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