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Spam Filters March 1, 2007

Posted by atharkhan in : Review, Tech , trackback

Note: This is an old post. Since then, Bloomba has been acquired by Yahoo.

WHY?
I am always looking for solutions to help eradicate Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) often referred to as “spam” from my inbox. Here are some different software products I have tried out. Hopefully my cursory beta testing will point you in the right direction in your search for fighting spam

MY REQUIREMENTS

I needed a client side product that would work BOTH with a POP email account as well as an MS Exchange email account under different Outlook profiles on the same computer. At one point, I was looking for something that would work with my HTTP based Hotmail account but since I no longer use it, this is not factor that I considered while evaluating these software packages.

SOFTWARE

Before you begin reading, I would like to point out that all reviews/opinions on this page are based on very cursory testing. As soon as a software exhibited any undesirable or unpredictable behavior, I removed it. Secondly, my opinions are based on MY requirements. What works for me, may not for you.

1. Qurb: http://www.qurb.com

I have been using Qurb for a while and it has worked great for me. Its an incredibly simple approach to fighting spam which works 100% of the time for me for both my Exchange and POP profiles. It does absolutely no content analysis. It works solely with White lists. It dynamically creates and collects all “approved senders” from the contacts folder and other folders that you specify as valid saved email. It can also do an auto confirmation which offloads the responsibility of validating the email in the quarantine folder upon the sender. You may want to edit the message though…its a little slanted towards advertising the product.

Qurb Pros:

Qurb Cons:

My Opinion: I use it. I like it. It works for me.

SA Proxy: http://saproxy.bloomba.com/

Another product I used (sometimes in conjunction with Qurb) is the Spam Assassin Proxy.
I started using SAProxy because it uses Bayesian filtering as outlined by Paul Graham’s “A Plan For Spam” (http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html)

But, the issue I ran into with SAProxy was that it did not work with Exchange. It could only work with POP Accounts. And, once the subject header is altered with the flag “*****SPAM*****,” I didn’t know how to revert back to the original. On a brighter note, it never flagged the wrong messages. It just let a few spam messages through here and there.

SA Proxy Pros:

SA Proxy Cons:

My Opinion: I am not actively using it. But, it is still on my computer. That’s a huge compliment coming from me. I never even install any software unless I like it. I will most likely go back to using it in conjunction with Qurb.

Spammunition: http://www.upserve.com/spammunition/default.asp

I have also tried another Bayesian Filtering product called Spammunition but it was absolutely worthless when working with two profiles (one exchange and one POP). If you are using just one profile, it could work well for you because it does a Bayesian analysis on all your folders and then uses those for its statistical analysis. Try it and see how you like it.

Spammunition Pros:

Spammunition Cons:

My Opinion: Would work fine with a single profile. Did not meet my requirements. 

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