Labs

SpamPal is a free anti-spam utility that runs on any Windows PC. It's small, fast and efficient at sorting through email. It has loads of options you can use to increase its effectiveness, which is good because its default settings detected just 53 per cent of the spam we sent through it.

SpamPal's main drawback is not in its spam-detection abilities but in its interface. The latest version looks identical to the software we've reviewed before and it still requires you to set up your email

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program manually so it works with SpamPal. Every other anti-spam program tested here automatically intercepts incoming mail without you having to make strange, proprietary entries in your email program's server settings.

Once you get it working, SpamPal is pretty good. It allowed every single one of our genuine email messages through without us having to enter our contacts' email addresses into the whitelist. It also let in over 140 spam messages, but you can fine-tune things to make detection rates better. Aside from Kaspersky Labs' anti-spam utility, SpamPal failed to recognise the most spam without any training.

If you are on a tight budget and have the time and expertise to play with its settings, you can get good results with SpamPal. It makes extensive use of internet spam databases, and changing those you use makes a big difference to how lax or harsh the anti-spam detection is.

Other anti-spam software has bypassed SpamPal in terms of usability and detection rates. It is free, but we would recommend that you buy a commercial anti-spam package.