Labs

Anti-Spam Software

Each anti-spam program was installed on a PC with a clean installation of Windows XP Professional Edition that had been fully updated with all the latest critical updates. The anti-spam program was also updated. If the anti-spam software required us to configure our email program, we did so.

We then used Outlook 2003 to download over 300 email messages from our special email system, which constantly collects spam and real email. We did not teach the anti-spam software to recognise spam and real messages, relying only on its default settings for its built-in detection and ability to use spam databases on the internet. We counted how many spam messages the software detected and how many it let through. We also counted how many real messages were classified as spam and how many arrived in the inbox.

In practice, these programs should get better at differentiating between real and spam messages as time goes on.