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eXpurgate - Free Spam Filtering Service

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By Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com

eXpurgate - Free Spam Filtering Service

eXpurgate - Free Spam Filtering Service

Heinz Tschabitscher
The Bottom Line
eXpurgate is an effortless but highly effective spam (and virus) filtering service. Its only real shortcoming is that eXpurgate relies on forwarding and requires two different email accounts.
Pros
  • eXpurgate detects spam with great precision and accuracy
  • Works seamlessly and without effort, saving you download time and resources
  • eXpurgate requires no configuration, maintenance or training
Cons
  • eXpurgate can't fetch mail from a POP or IMAP account itself, requires forwarding
  • The spam detection rate of eXpurgate is a bit short of a personalized Bayesian filter
  • The address eXpurgate delivers filtered mail to must not get in the hands of spammers
Description
  • eXpurgate is an effective spam and virus filtering service.
  • You set up your email account to forward to eXpurgate, where the messages are filtered.
  • The filtered mail is then forwarded to another email account by eXpurgate where you can download it.
  • eXpurgate classifies mail in the main categories clean, bulk, spam and dangerous.
  • For each category, you can designate an address to forward to.
  • Additionally, eXpurgate can add headers or modify subjects for filtering in your email program.
  • eXpurgate recognizes patterns of viral spread and dams outbreaks in addition to classic scanning.
  • You can get statistics and graphs about the number and volume of each mail type in eXpurgate.
Guide Review - eXpurgate - Free Spam Filtering Service
Spam is everybody's problem, so there should be a spam filter that everybody can use. eXpurgate comes very close. After you have mastered the setup, eXpurgate works in an amazingly simple but at the same time highly effective manner.

Using a combination of header, message and source analysis as well as self-learning algorithms, eXpurgate manages to spot spam with a precision that can only be beat by well-trained personalized Bayesian filters.

Nary a junk email escapes the system, but what's even better is the extremely low rate of false positives. In my tests, I did not encounter one. No, eXpurgate successfully differentiates between true spam and good mail that merely looks suspicious, sorts newsletters and other bulk email from delicate content and can even filter out potentially dangerous HTML messages and viruses.

The only real drawback to eXpurgate is the type of setup it requires. You have to use at least two different email accounts to use eXpurgate. Your old, "default" email address must be able to forward to eXpurgate where the messages are filtered and sent on to another, clean account.

This allows for flexible sorting to different email addresses (you could check the "spam" account only one a month via the web, for example, saving time and bandwidth) or locally via headers, but it still would be nice if eXpurgate could fetch the messages from POP and IMAP accounts itself and optionally make them available via its own POP service.

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