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Software

Testing antispam products

As many of you know, I have a business where I do computer work (installations, upgrades, troubleshooting) for local people and build web pages for anyone. Visit the PC Improvements web site for more information. I’ve had this domain since 1998 and I literally get 100+ junk emails a day through its email accounts. A few weeks ago I did a review of iHateSpam by Sunbelt Software. At the time I was very impressed by its features and it seems to do a remarkable job at alleviating my problem.

Since then, I have also tried POPFile and SpamBayes. Both of these are free (open source) projects. Overall I’ve been far more impressed with these two than iHateSpam. PopFile using standard Bayesian filtering and using all of the features of the software, after 10,000 messages it had classified 99% of them correctly! SpamBayes uses a modified version of Bayesian filtering which is supposed to be better, but I find that it only classifies about 60% of my junk email as positively junk, and about 30% as suspected junk. The remaining 10% requires me to classify them manually.

Until I try some other products, I highly recommend POPFile!