Labs

If this review of SpamCatcher 4 gives you a case of dej vu, it could be because we looked at it in our anti-spam Labs test in Shopper September 2005. The price is slightly cheaper now, but what of its spam-filtering abilities?

Allume might not have updated its software for a while, but this raft of results were much better than last time. Last year

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the program detected only 17 per cent of the spam we threw at it. This time it caught 72 per cent, putting it slightly above the average in this test. It also handled every one of the real email messages correctly, which puts it in a minority.

Setting up the software is easy. The settings are accessible from the Windows Start menu or from a drop-down list in Outlook. The range of settings is wide and useful, including the ability to use internet spam databases to help classify spam. As with most of the programs tested here, spending time and effort tuning the system will help improve its accuracy.

It looks rough around the edges, but it's the cheapest option here and works well. If you want a standalone anti-spam program, we recommend this or Cloudmark Desktop. Cloudmark Desktop is more effective with its default settings but it works only with Outlook or Outlook Express. If you don't use either of these, go for SpamCatcher.