Product Reviews

With the problem of junk email reaching epidemic proportions, more and more companies are offering software products that claim to rid your inbox of unwanted adverts. We reviewed eight programs in our recent anti-spam Labs (Shopper June 2004) and now BitDefender has launched its brand new but confusingly numbered AntiSpam 7.

We installed the software on our PC in just a few minutes and it automatically integrated itself into both Outlook and Outlook Express. In Outlook it automatically set itself up to move all junk emails into a special folder, but in Outlook

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Express it simply adds '[spam]' to the subject of all unwanted messages. This makes it easy for you to set up a filter to move junk into a folder or the bin.

We tested the software using our standard set of 610 assorted emails. The software incorrectly identified 28 per cent of genuine emails as junk and missed 33 per cent of the junk emails. This shows a lower level of accuracy than our Best Buy, Symantec's Norton AntiSpam 2004, which recorded 8.7 per cent and 20.6 per cent respectively.

However, AntiSpam 7 uses several filtering techniques, one of which is the trainable Bayesian method. This means that it learns from the messages you identify as junk and those you say are genuine, allowing it to perform better over time. Whitelist and blacklist facilities are also available, allowing you to identify which senders are genuine and which you always want removed.

AntiSpam 7 also includes a cut-down version of BitDefender's anti-virus program. If you don't have any virus protection already - and you should - AntiSpam 7 would be a useful buy. If you simply want the most accurate spam filter, we'd recommend Norton AntiSpam 2004.