Labs

We have not allowed any of the programs here the chance to adapt to the sort of email they received during our tests, and this hit InBoxer particularly hard. This is because it needs to analyse the content of the email you usually receive and uses the results to analyse email that arrives later on.

Because our test doesn't allow the programs time to learn, InBoxer only discovered one piece of spam. It falsely classified one real message as spam too, and decided that 32 other messages were suspicious. In fact, only one of those messages was spam.

Surely a program that failed our test and

ADVERTISEMENT

that costs nearly £20 should get one star at most? Not in this case, because InBoxer isn't bad at all once you get it up and running. We haven't given it the benefit of a month's training, simply because none of the other programs was afforded that benefit. However, at its core runs the powerful SpamBayes software, an open-source project that can produce some very accurate spam-detection results given time.

InBoxer's interface doesn't set us alight with excitement, but it's certainly simple. Most of the time you just need to highlight a spam message in your inbox and click the Block button that shows in Outlook's toolbar. Alternatively, open the InBoxer-Blocked mailbox and click on a real message and press the Keep toolbar button.

The rules of our tests have been unfair to InBoxer. Its rating here reflects its outdated interface and the fact that it's twice as expensive as the more polished Norton AntiSpam. InBoxer has one significant benefit over Symantec's product, though: you don't have to pay an annual subscription. It's available on a 30-day free trial so, if you're interested in playing with Bayesian spam analysis, you can give it a go without spending anything.