Labs

We have not reviewed Softwin's BitDefender security software before. The company provides an anti-spam utility bundled with other software, including anti-virus and firewall programs. The price may seem high, but it includes a two-year licence, and the software can be installed on two separate PCs. But would you want to, once you learn how it handles spam?

Possibly not, if you consider our test results. It successfully

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detected 62 per cent of the spam, which is not too bad. However, it also sent half of our real email to the bin as well. You can add friendly email addresses to the whitelist to reduce the chances of this happening, though. If you do install this software on a system containing real email, you can use the optional wizard to learn and import contacts automatically.

When spam is detected, it is moved directly into the Deleted Items folder of your email program, and the messages are marked as read. If you are in the process of teaching the software what is spam and what is not, you'll manually need to check this folder to see if there are any genuine messages that have been incorrectly classified.

BitDefender's anti-spam software didn't shine in our tests. However, it comes bundled with lots of extra security software, which we will be testing over the coming months. If you are after the best anti-spam protection in a security suite, though, we recommend Trend Micro PC-cillin 14.