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Spam Interceptor - Spam Filtering Service
Spam Interceptor - Spam Filtering Service
Heinz Tschabitscher
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Spam Interceptor - Spam Filtering Service

From Heinz Tschabitscher,
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The Bottom Line

Spam Interceptor is an elegant, easy to use and flexible, but most of all effective spam filtering solution. Its combination of multiple strategies works great — unfortunately for POP accounts only. Spam Interceptor is no longer available.
Pros
  • Spam Interceptor combines challenge/response and scoring filters
  • Elegant, simple and effective, Spam Interceptor is a joy to use
  • Spam Interceptor can filter based on a sender's average spam score
Cons
  • Spam Interceptor supports POP accounts only
  • Spammers using whitelisted addresses get through

Description

  • Spam Interceptor intercepts spam before it reaches your email client's Inbox.
  • Working as a filtering gateway, Spam Interceptor fetches mail from your POP account periodically.
  • While you use Spam Interceptor through a nice web interface, mail can be downloaded using POP.
  • Spam Interceptor uses heuristic filters to determine each message's spam score.
  • Low-score mail always gets through and mail with a high score is always blocked.
  • Senders of mail with a score in between are sent a challenging message to which they must respond.
  • Spam Interceptor can also filter based on the average score mail from a certain sender gets.
  • All thresholds can be configured, challenging can be turned off completely.
  • Trashed mail can be recovered easily through Spam Interceptor's web interface.

Guide Review - Spam Interceptor - Spam Filtering Service

Challenge/response spam filtering — only mail from known senders is allowed through, and new senders must respond to a challenge to "authenticate" — works effectively, but it has a number of flaws, too.

Spam Interceptor makes smart use of challenge/response filtering while escaping most of its drawbacks by placing a scoring filter in front of it. Mail that's certainly not spam is always allowed through while senders of mail with a large score aren't challenged either. Their mail is simply trashed (but easily recoverable).

Spam Interceptor can even filter based on the average score of mail from a sender, so you get away without using black and white lists a lot and still have most of the spam filtered out with little to no false positives.
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