Spam Filter Tools

If you read my earlier rant on the current state of email and spam, you'll probably understand that I've evaluated a few tools regarding spam filtering.

I have a basic outlook on spam filtering: I shouldn't have to pay for it, the spammers should.

Bearing that in mind, I've aimed for free spam filtering when I could, but I still have yet to find a decent solution. Here's who I've tried and what I think of them...

Ella

This one seemed to work fairly well, and it had the added feature of not only filtering out spam, but shuffling newsletters off into a separate folder as well. It wasn't as bulletproof as some of the others in regards to catching all of the spam, but it worked pretty well.

Selling Point: Free with a little added signature to the bottom of your emails after so many trial days.

Here's the downside. I updated Office 2003 via the Microsoft update website, and afterwards, Ella went bye-bye. The toolbar in outlook for Ella disappeared, and no matter what I tried (repair utility, new download and install, etc) it didn't come back. I didn't really do a lot of research online to try and solve the problem, so ding me for that. My solution was to download and try out Spam Alarm.


Spam Alarm

Short Trial period, email tagline that I wasn't really warned about.

Works okay, not 100%, and it kills spam instead of sending it to another folder. You can change these settings (send to spam folder instead of deleting), but you can't make an "Across the board" change, you have to make the change one filter at a time (this sucks).

Spamcatcher

I actually bought this one for a few bucks, but it seemed to expire after only a relatively short time (for something I had purchased). I bought it in conjunction with a special offer, and I probably didn't read all of the fine print.

It worked fairly well, but here's what I didn't like: It created a "go-between" mail server on my machine and required that I change all of my mail account settings in outlook for it to work.

It created a couple of folders (Spamcatcher block and Spamcatcher accept) that I could simply drag messages to to indicate if they were spam or not, and thus, spamcatcher would train itself in response.

In general this program worked pretty good. The drawback was the use of the "go-between" mail server, which I don't like.