The Bottom Line
Spam Alarm is an easy to use and simple anti-spam tool. Unfortunately, its filters are inflexible and, worse, produce too many false positives to trust them completely. Spam Alarm is no longer available.
Pros
- Spam Alarm is easy to use
- Uses black/white lists, filters, statistics
- Automatic filter updates
Cons
- Spam Alarm produced some false positives
- Statistical analysis can't adapt
- Supports POP accounts only
Description
- Spam Alarm checks multiple POP accounts for new mail and spam periodically.
- Spam Alarm detects spam using a combination of three filtering approaches.
- First, Spam Alarm checks incoming mail against (custom and preset) white and black lists.
- Then a set of flexible filters built to detect common spam is run on each message.
- Finally, Spam Alarm performs statistical analysis to compute the likeliness of mail being spam.
- The filters applied by Spam Alarm can be updated automatically from the Net.
- A filter editor and a filter wizard make it easy to build comprehensive filters in Spam Alarm.
- Detected spam can be automatically deleted (but saved locally for later recovery).
- Spam Alarm supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP.
Guide Review - Spam Alarm 2.0.3.2 - Spam Filter
Spam Alarm approaches the challenge of detecting spam on the premise that two filters are better than one. Three are, of course, even better.
So Spam Alarm first checks incoming mail against black and white lists. Then each email must survive the filters (which can only be turned off selectively, not customized). Finally, Spam Alarm uses statistical analysis.
Unfortunately, the filters are a bit overzealous and the statistical analysis uses a predefined set of characteristics and can't adapt. To eliminate the false positives, you can only turn off filters and add people to your whitelist.
Spam Alarm is easy and nice, but its filters could be better and the statistical analysis could be turned into an adaptive statistical analysis.
