Labs

Past versions of McAfee SpamKiller have caused us many problems. We've seen terrible spam detection rates and had headaches as the software struggled to handle large amounts of email, crashing along the way. The latest release was no exception. As soon as the email started to download, the PC appeared to freeze before even a dozen messages appeared in the inbox.

While the test PCs appeared to break, Outlook and SpamKiller were actually dealing with the email, but there was no indication that things were working as the screen refused to update. We ended up leaving it a few

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hours, rebooted in frustration, and finally SpamKiller began. On a very fast PC it works, just. On a 533MHz system, which is twice as fast as the minimum requirements, everything falls apart.

The previous release of SpamKiller had very patchy detection abilities, but this version astounded us with its high accuracy. It misclassified some of our real email as spam, but it did this to less than 18 per cent of the genuine mail, which isn't too bad. It caught every spam message we threw at it.

There are two ways that McAfee SpamKiller can handle spam. By default it stores blocked messages in its own file store and keeps them there for a couple of weeks before deleting them. If you prefer a more traditional approach, you can command it to change the message's subject heading to include [SPAM] or any other message you choose. We prefer this option, not least because we don't trust the way that SpamKiller handles large volumes of email.

Despite its reasonable price and excellent spam-detecting abilities we cannot recommend this program because of its instability when handling the amount of email we'd expect to receive when returning from holiday.