Cloudmark Desktop for Microsoft Outlook

Outlook users who are tired of being victimized by spam have a reason for hope: Cloudmark Desktop for Microsoft Outlook does an excellent job of killing spam and phishing attempts. It integrates right into Outlook, so no extra steps are involved--receive mail as you normally do, and Cloudmark does its work.

When Cloudmark detects what it believes is spam, it routes the mail automatically to a Spam folder, where you can examine the mail, then delete it. If you prefer, you can have the software take other actions on spam, such as automatically deleting it, routing it to a Spam folder for a week and then deleting it, and so on.

The program learns as you use it, so that you can unblock messages marked as spam so they get through in the future, or mark as spam messages Cloudmark mistakenly let through. You can also create "Smartlists" of senders whose mail will never be marked as spam.

I found, over time, that Cloudmark was a more effective spam-killer than the one built into Outlook. It was far better at flagging spam that Outlook allowed through. Part of the reason may be that Cloudmark uses social intelligence to determine spam; as all Cloudmark uses flag spam on their own, that information is sent to a central database, which is then used to update the spam filter on everyone's version of the software.

--Preston Gralla