The Bottom Line
- Advanced Spam Defense is slick and elegant, easy to use
- Comes with many flexible scoring filters, can filter out certain character sets
- Advanced Spam Defense isn't very precise, prone to mis-identifying spam
- Advanced Spam Defense supports POP accounts only, doesn't work as proxy server
Description
- Advanced Spam Defense checks multiple POP email accounts for spam periodically.
- Using scoring filters, Advanced Spam Defense assigns color codes to good, suspicious and junk emails.
- You can also keep flexible white lists of senders, recipients, words and phrases.
- It's easy to add email addresses from the Windows address book, phrases from existing emails.
- Advanced Spam Defense can block certain character sets and attachments.
- Advanced Spam Defense supports Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/3/XP.
Guide Review - Advanced Spam Defense 1.0 - Spam Filter
Unfortunately, Advanced Spam Defense's filter doesn't quite live up to this promise. Its filters are numerous and mean well with easily adjustable scoring — they still catch a lot of good mail for various reasons. One problem seems to be that the scoring works only in one way: up. All criteria — of which there are many — are examined and the individual spam scores are summed up until the threshold is reached.
Sure, you can make use of the easy to use white list (which automatically synchronizes with your Windows address book, too), but that's neither as easy and simple nor as precise and efficient as an anti-spam tool can be. At least Advanced Spam Defense shows you what made it think a particular messages was junk, and you can safely preview emails before having Advanced Spam Defense delete them on the server. For even more safety, Advanced Spam Defense can sort out emails with certain (worm-prone) attachments automatically.
Unfortunately, Advanced Spam Defense works only with POP accounts, and for them you can't proxy through it.
