McAfee Internet Security Suite 2006

Using a barrage of filtering, including meta-character, invisible text, too many images and intentional misspelling tactics, we weren't altogether surprised to see a poor false-positive return, up from 6.8 per cent to 9.2 per cent this year. Although these results quite rightly represent a failure in the spam testing, we must point out that over time these figures will improve as McAfee learns what you regard as spam or otherwise. The 'friends' list composed of your imported contacts and then improved by use of an 'add friends' button will help, but the lack of a corresponding address-based black list is unfortunate. Indeed, unlike ZoneAlarm/MailFrontier, there's no simple way to block an address or domain; instead, you must construct a filter in order to achieve this simplest and most successful of spam-trapping methods. On the positive side, it filters POP3 mail irrespective of client and handles MSN/Hotmail with equal aplomb, as it does IMAP and Exchange accounts under Outlook.

For anti-virus protection alone, McAfee shone particularly brightly in this group test, but when it comes to the vital double whammy of spam and spyware it falls behind the market leaders.