The Bottom Line
MailMate is a solid and easy to use anti-spam tool that does catch a good deal of spam. Its Achilles heel is the lack of precision, though. Avoiding false positives requires continuous attention.
Pros
- MailMate has a clean, easy to use interface
- Tells you why mail is filtered, easy recovery
- Can import account settings and friends lists
Cons
- MailMate not precise enough, false positives
- Doesn't work as a true proxy
- Supports POP accounts only
Description
- MailMate filters POP email accounts for spam.
- MailMate works as a middleperson between your email client and the server.
- Spam identified by MailMate is moved to a quarantine area and can be easily browsed or recovered.
- MailMate uses keyword and country filters, black/white lists as well as a number of special filters.
- You can bounce back unwanted emails to the sender using MailMate.
- It's easy to build a white list of friends by importing addresses from several email clients.
- MailMate supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP.
Guide Review - MailMate 2.1.5 - Spam Filter
MailMate comes with a clear, uncluttered interface and so is its mission: sit in between email client and mail server, filtering out the junk and letting through the good mail.
MailMate's default settings succeed in the former, but they catch some good mail, unfortunately. But even if you tweak the settings to your liking (disabling the mail-not-addressed-to-me filter, for example) and whitelist your friends, the filtering engine of MailMate isn't precise enough. That's because it uses neither scoring nor adaptive filters using statistics or neural networks, for example.
MailMate does tell you why it filtered a message, though, and it's easy to whitelist new senders and recover the message. It's a pity MailMate only supports POP accounts.
