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Spam Interceptor - Spam Filtering Service

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Spam Interceptor - Spam Filtering Service

Spam Interceptor - Spam Filtering Service

Heinz Tschabitscher

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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