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McAfee SpamKiller 5.0
November 11, 2003
By Larry J. Seltzer
In many ways, McAfee SpamKiller 5.0
takes an old-fashioned approach to spam filtering. It operates as a separate mail proxy program that retrieves your mail from a server and strips out what it thinks is
spam. Your mail client then retrieves the legitimate mail from the proxy.
Under Outlook and Outlook Express, McAfee SpamKiller 5.0
installs a toolbar that lets users mark messages as spam, view spam already blocked, and add senders of current messages to
whitelists. That said, we found user interaction quite slow. Every operation, such as viewing a blocked message, seems to take an annoying second or two as opposed to the instant response we're used to.
McAfee SpamKiller 5.0
does have a number of strengths compared with Norton Antispam 2004. It supports Hotmail and MAPI (Exchange Server) e-mail accounts natively. It also has a number of advanced features not generally available in competing products. Individual settings are kept for each user on the computer, and you can define custom spam filters for each user or globally. The filter definition screens are powerful.
McAfee SpamKiller 5.0
can import many kinds of address books and reimport them periodically on a user-defined schedule to keep your whitelist up to date. It can also send automated complaints to spam senders.
Unfortunately, its spam-catching performance—at least without fine-tuning—trails that of the others here.
McAfee SpamKiller 5.0
missed more spam (10.8 percent) than Norton Antispam 2004
on our tests. What's worse, it also generated far more false positives (legitimate correspondence categorized as
spam) than the others. We consider a false positive result above 5 percent to be unacceptable.
If you want to take the time, you can play with McAfee SpamKiller
5.0's customized filtering features to improve its performance. But this would be an ongoing exercise—something the product should be doing for you.
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Norton Antispam 2004
November 11, 2003
By Larry J. Seltzer
Norton Antispam 2004 is a huge step up from the company's initial attempt in the
anti-spam market. This year's model is available as part of Norton Internet Security suite as well as a standalone utility.
Like Norton AntiVirus, the program is meant to be used on automatic pilot, with Symantec deciding what's good and bad. You get an aggressiveness slider control for Low, Medium (default), or High, but it's not nearly as configurable as
SpamKiller.
Norton Antispam 2004 monitors all your POP3 mail access, so it works with a wide variety of clients—though notably not with
IMAP, Exchange Server, AOL, or HTTP mail. And this POP3 approach means that AntiSpam cannot scan existing mail folders, only incoming mail.
Symantec has gathered some of the better approaches in other products into this one. Outlook, Outlook Express, and even Eudora users get toolbar buttons to mark misidentified messages as spam or legitimate mail. The toolbar buttons train Norton Antispam 2004 about your e-mail. The program also looks at outgoing mail for hints about what your mail looks like.
When you install the program, it automatically adds the people in your default Windows address book to its
whitelist. Unlike with SpamKiller, however, you can add names only from the default address book. If you never talk to strangers, you can set the program to reject all mail from users not on the
whitelist.
Deep in the program is a custom filter in which you can define specific words and phrases (in various parts of a message) and how the program should handle messages that matched. It's a welcome feature, though it could be more intuitive to use. But unlike with some competing programs, there is no way to block mail in languages other than English.
Like SpamKiller, AntiSpam felt very slow in our testing. During setup (on a Pentium III/500 with 256MB of RAM), for example, after we clicked the Configure button, the next dialog box took 8 seconds to open. Fortunately, you don't need to work in this program very often. All the action is in your e-mail client where it belongs.
Performance is Norton Antispam
2004's strong suit. It had a false-positive rate of just 1.5 percent out of the box, which is more than acceptable. It effectively stopped 91.6 percent of incoming spam messages, better than either SpamKiller or Outlook. That said, if you are planning on moving to Outlook 2003, you may be perfectly happy with its performance—especially since you won't pay extra for the antispam feature.
For everyone else, however, Norton Antispam 2004 delivers on its mission, conferring laudable spam protection in an unobtrusive package.
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