3 FREE Spam Filters - Compared

3 Free Anti-Spam Programs Reviewed

If viruses are the scourge of the information age, spam is the court jester. Essentially harmless if deleted, spam, or unsolicited email, is employed for all kinds of purposes. It can pitch real products and services, it can "phish" for personal information used to steal your credit or identity, it can transport malicious code that awaits you to execute it, or it can simply make fun of the size of your nether regions.

One thing's for sure: If too much spam makes it into your inbox, it's a real annoyance and, to the less Internet savvy, it can be dangerous. We pulled three, free-for-personal-use anti-spam programs off the Web and gave them a specific challenge: Beat Microsoft Outlook's own anti-spam prowess. The anti-spam programs are:

• SpamBayes
• MailWasher
• SPAMfighter

Outlook has a pretty decent spam filter. Frequently updated by Microsoft, Outlook manages to route, on default settings, most of a hail of spam into its junk folder while keeping legitimate messages in the regular inbox. It's not perfect on its own, though.

SpamBayes

SpamBayes is a free Bayesian anti-spam filter. Written in Python, it's available for Windows XP, Vista, and a batch of other operating systems and compatible with Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, IncrediMail, Thunderbird, and a host of other email clients.

If you navigate to the download page, you're offered a number of downloadables for various combinations of OS and email clients. Scroll down for a complete description of how the software works. In a nutshell:

SpamBayes attempts to compare email messages and classify them as spam (unsolicited, unnecessary junk), ham (legitimate messages), or unsure. Therein lies the initial problem with SpamBayes: it requires extensive training on the part of the user, as most email drops into the unsure category at first.

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We had to sort through each message and, using a toolbar it installed into Outlook, tell the program which ones we wanted and which ones we didn't. Considering the sheer amount of email we receive, it was cumbersome at first. We spent a good chunk of our day telling SpamBayes which notes were spam and which weren't.

We're not going to ding the sheer amount of time and effort that the team put into developing SpamBayes, and then offering it for free. However, compared to SPAMfighter, it required simply too much footwork for a set of email accounts flooded with messages, good and bad, all day long.

The SpamBayes Toolbar

Toward the end of its trial period, SpamBayes slowly started to recognize the difference between spam and legit messages, and sent them to the proper folders. The Junk Suspects folder it created in Outlook for notes it was unsure about, however, continued to fill up steadily, and required our frequent attention. SpamBayes might work well for someone with few email accounts who doesn't get a lot of messages, but the amount of training required turned us off.

One more note: after we uninstalled SpamBayes, it left its toolbar in Outlook. This, folks, is where bloat comes from: Programs that don't completely uninstall.

In the end, we prefer Outlook's built in filter, which, though not as accurate as SpamBayes has the potential to eventually become, works right out of the box with little input necessary. Continued...

Product:	SpamBayes
Company:	SpamBayes
Price:	$0
Pros:	Accurate after training.
Cons:	Training requires a monumental amount of effort if you receive a large amount of email.
Summary:	SpamBayes, at first, for someone who receives a lot of email, requires way too much work on the part of the user. It does, however, become more accurate with training and might work for lightly used email accounts, or very patient people.
Rating:

MailWasher

MailWasher is an anti-spam freebie that works with your email server, and requires its own front-end separate of Outlook. It allows you to delete illegitimate messages without downloading them from the server, and to bounce spam back to the sender as if your address is invalid.

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Before downloading your email, MailWasher gets the headers (the data that identifies the email source) and allows you to decide what to do with each piece of mail. As it learns your habits, MailWasher processes mail automatically for you. After you use MailWasher, you proceed to your email program which downloads the approved messages.

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Our complaints about MailWasher are twofold: First, as with SpamBayes, we had to do the vast majority of the dirty work in identifying, bouncing, allowing, or otherwise processing headers. MailWasher's training period seems to be about equivalent to SpamBayes. Secondly, MailWasher doesn't integrate with Outlook; it requires its own front-end. That forces an extra step on the user who simply wants to retrieve legitimate email.

The good news about MailWasher is that it works independently of email clients, so it works with any of them. You can do as you please with any email it receives, and it does eventually learn your habits and process email on its own.

Unfortunately, the amount of work you do to weed out junk mail isn't worth the time of anyone who gets the amount of mail we do.

Once again, we end up preferring Outlook's built-in filter. Continued...

Product:	MailWasher
Company:	MailWasher
Price:	$0
Pros:	Blocks spam at the server, not your computer; learns your patterns eventually.
Cons:	Massive amount of user input required. Doesn't integrate with Outlook; requires an extra step in retrieving email.
Summary:	Once again, we have a program ideal for users with light amounts of incoming email, but training this utility will break the backs of heavy email users—at least at first.
Rating:

SPAMfighter

Unlike "training" spam filters, SPAMfighter Standard uses a community-based service. Everyone who uses it trains its server to recognize what email is spam, and what isn't. This makes it work immediately. There's no training period; you don't have to do the work for it. That scores big, big points with us.

It's also amazingly accurate—more accurate than Outlook's own junk mail filter. We found ourselves recovering much fewer legitimate messages from the spam folder, and flagging fewer illegitimate messages that came through to our inbox as spam.

SpamFighter's Toolbar

SPAMfighter installs a toolbar into Outlook, and it allows you to block or unblock messages, whitelist or blacklist addresses and domains, and more. It's extremely handy and quick to use, but you won't find yourself using it much because of SPAMfighter's amazing accuracy.

SPAMfighter creates its own folder in Outlook and drops suspect emails into it. It didn't fill up very often, though, with unknown emails only trickling into it a few at a time. Really, we didn't have to put much work into SPAMfighter at all, and that's how we like it.

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It works better than Outlook's installed folder, and it's free for personal use (corporate users require SPAMfighter Pro which costs $29). We've decided to go ahead and leave SPAMfighter installed for our personal email. It's that good.

Product:	SPAMfighter
Company:	SPAMfighter
Price:	$0
Pros:	Works immediately without frequent user input; few messages end up in the wrong places.
Cons:	Occasional input needed, but nothing compared to the other anti-spam programs sampled here.
Summary:	Easily the best anti-spam freebie we tested.
Rating: