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The Bottom Line
- MailFrontier Desktop combines powerful anti-spam tactics
- Includes community filters, sender challenging and adaptive content filtering
- MailFrontier Desktop is easy to use and integrates well with Outlook, Outlook Express
- MailFrontier Desktop's filtering could be more precise
- Doesn't work with all email programs
- Challenges often unnecessary, can be a nuisance
Description
- MailFrontier Desktop is a spam filtering plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.
- Combines black and white lists, scoring and community filters, and a challenge system.
- MailFrontier Desktop automatically populates the list of allowed senders and keeps it up to date.
- Community filtering uses other MailFrontier user's decisions to identify spam.
- Block and unblock buttons make it easy to share what you consider spam with the community.
- The aggressiveness of both the community filter and the content filters can be tweaked.
- MailFrontier Desktop can automatically send a graphical challenge to senders of suspicious emails.
- MailFrontier can adapt its content filter to the mail you receive and block certain languages.
- Mail with fraudulent content is placed in a special folder.
- MailFrontier Desktop supports Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/3/XP and Outlook 2000/2, Outlook Express 5/6.
Guide Review - MailFrontier Desktop 4.8.1 - Spam Filter
That's what MailFrontier apparently thought, and the result is MailFrontier Desktop. MailFrontier Desktop is an easy to use add-on for Outlook and Outlook Express implementing all these anti-spam approaches. The techniques already work well together, but each could need some refinement individually.
The community filter in particular does not match the accuracy of similar systems, and overall spam detection is not stellar either. The challenge system generates unnecessary mail and can be a nuisance to new contacts. If you turn off these challenges and don't use the white list of known senders extensively you may run into some false positives.
MailFrontier Desktop makes it a point to protect you not only from spam but also from fraudulent mail. Messages that raise a fraud alert with Matador are placed in a special folder and may even be announced via a pop-up. This probably grants too much honor to this type of junk.
