The Bottom Line
Pros
- Spartacus Spam-Filter filters junk mail precisely and is easy to use
- Can follow links in emails and take them into account for even better precision
- A initial corpus is available for Spartacus Spam-Filter to shorten the training period
Cons
- Spartacus Spam-Filter works with Outlook and, less perfectly, with Outlook Express only
- Doesn't allow more categories than spam and not spam
- Spartacus Spam-Filter gives the curious little insight into its analysis and data
Description
- Spartacus Spam-Filter is a spam filter plug-in for Outlook and Outlook Express.
- Making use of Bayesian statistics, Spartacus moves detected junk to a "Spambox" folder.
- Additionally, Spartacus Spam-Filter uses your address book as a white list of trusted senders.
- It's easy to mark and delete any message as spam using a Spartacus toolbar button.
- False positive messages can be recovered from the Spartacus "Spambox" via drag and drop.
- Spartacus Spam-Filter can follow links in emails and take them into account for spam probability.
- Spartacus Spam-Filter supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/3/XP and Outlook 97+ or Outlook Express 5+.
Guide Review - Spartacus Spam-Filter 1.3.2 - Spam Filter
Spartacus Spam-Filter is a junk mail filter nicely integrated with Outlook and Outlook Express that lets you delete spam that makes it to your Inbox with a single toolbar click. Of course, due to Spartacus' Bayesian nature, this won't be necessary often as it learns quickly from the emails you delete as spam.
If you want to shorten the training period further, you can download an initial corpus, but I'd rather use your own mail exclusively as this ensures the best accuracy. À apropos accuracy: Spartacus can take links in emails into account to detect spam using just an image an a link better, but in my experience it's usually not worth the extra time and resources.
It's a bit counter-intuitive that you mark mail as spam with a toolbar button but can only un-mark it by drag-and-dropping it to your Inbox, and I wish the white list of senders in your address book could be turned off, but otherwise Spartacus Spam-Filter is a really great tool.
Unfortunately, it doesn't answer my curiosity (isn't it nice to know which words have what kind of frequency and spam score?) and doesn't allow you to set up additional email categories for automatic mail classification.
