Labs

Anti-Spam Software

We tested these anti-spam programs on a clean installation of Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 and Outlook 2003. The anti-spam software was installed and updated with the latest filters available. Each computer was then set up to download email from our own mail server, which has been specially created for anti-spam tests. When the email had been downloaded we checked to see how much of the spam was classified as such, and how many of the real email messages were incorrectly classed as spam. We kept an eye out for too many false positives as well as too many spam messages slipping through to the inbox.

All year round we monitor spam using a dedicated email server that also receives real email. Spam and real mail is carefully sorted and, when it's time to test anti-spam software, the system provides one month's worth of email. This sample is a representative collection of real messages mixed in with unsolicited mail. This time only 17 per cent of the sample comprised genuine email, so it's clear that sorting spam is no longer a job most people have time to do manually.

Most of the programs here have the capacity to learn, which means you have to train them over time, adding your friends' email addresses and manually deleting unwanted messages. After a while the software's spam-detection abilities will improve and you'll have to intervene less often.

We have not given the programs here a chance to learn, and we haven't added any email addresses to our friends list. This means that the programs are being tested entirely on their out-of-the-box abilities, so the results reported here show the worst-case scenario. You can expect them all to become more accurate with a bit of care and attention.

This testing method is particularly harsh for two of the products, which rely almost entirely on learning. While our results make Firetrust MailWasher Pro 5 and InBoxer for Outlook 2 look thoroughly useless, they will become much more accurate if you play around with the software.

However, we don't like messing around with settings and prefer our anti-spam software to do most, if not all, the work for us, particularly if we're going to pay for it. So we don't feel too sorry for the programs that require a loving owner. We'll opt for the more independent utilities in most cases.