The Bottom Line
Pros
- SPAMfighter Pro is simple and easy to use
- Harnessing the power of its user base, SPAMfighter Pro spots a good deal of spam
- Integrates well with Outlook, Windows Mail and Outlook Express
Cons
- SPAMfighter Pro is not as precise as Bayesian filtering, some false positives turn up
- It's impossible to find out why a message was filtered or what reporting it really reports
- SPAMfighter Pro doesn't work with IMAP accounts
Description
- SPAMfighter Pro filters spam in Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird.
- Spam is detected by SPAMfighter Pro using community filtering.
- If a number of people report a message as junk, it is filtered for all SPAMfighter Pro users.
- Blocking and unblocking mail is easy via a SPAMfighter Pro toolbar.
- SPAMfighter Pro also uses local black and white lists of bad and good senders.
- The (mystic) filter sensitivity of SPAMfighter Pro can be adjusted to your needs.
- SPAMfighter Pro keeps and lets you see filtering statistics.
- SPAMfighter Pro supports Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/3/XP/Vista with Outlook 2000/2/3, Windows Mail 6 and Outlook Express 5/6.
Guide Review - SPAMfighter Pro 7 - Spam Filter
If you spot a junk email that SPAMfighter Pro did not catch, you can block it with a single click. This removes the message from your Inbox and blacklists the sender for you, but it also reports the junk mail as spam to SPAMfighter Pro.
When a number of other people report the same or a very similar message, it is automatically blocked for all users of SPAMfighter Pro. Using this community approach to spam filtering, SPAMfighter Pro manages to find a good deal of the junk emails immediately, and if some spam makes it through to your Inbox, you get the good feeling of helping others when you block it.
Unfortunately, this doesn't happen all that rarely, and I've seen a number of good emails blocked by SPAMfighter Pro, too. Unblocking these false positives is easy, though, and should remove them from SPAMfighter Pro's email-to-block list — until somebody else starts to block them again, at least. It's not clear whether SPAMfighter Pro uses a reputation system or whether spam reports are double to limit the chance of abuse.
It's also a pity SPAMfighter Pro does work with Mozilla Thunderbird, Windows Mail, Outlook Express and Outlook only, and doesn't support IMAP accounts.
