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BullGuard Spamfilter 8.0 - Free Spam Filter

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User Rating1.0 out of 5 (1 Review)  Write a Review

By Heinz Tschabitscher, About.com

BullGuard Spamfilter - Free Spam Filter

BullGuard Spamfilter - Free Spam Filter

Heinz Tschabitscher
The Bottom Line
BullGuard Spamfilter plugs into Outlook, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird to filter spam quite effectively and without much effort on your part. Do prepare to report some spam, though, white-list known senders to protect their emails — and look elsewhere if you use a different email program, or an IMAP account.
Pros
  • BullGuard Spamfilter filters junk mail quite effectively without much maintenance
  • Integration with Outlook, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird makes BullGuard easy to use
Cons
  • BullGuard Spamfilter does not work as a proxy or standalone application with any email program
  • IMAP accounts are not filtered even in supported email programs
Description
  • BullGuard Spamfilter filters junk mail in Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird.
  • Incoming spam from POP accounts is automatically filed to a junk mail folder.
  • BullGuard Spamfilter uses its user community and rules-based filtering to identify spam.
  • Convenient "This is spam" and "This is not spam" buttons let you correct errors and report junk.
  • BullGuard Spamfilter includes white and black lists to allow and disallow certain senders.
  • The white list can be filled with address book contacts and addresses from sent mail easily.
  • BullGuard Spamfilter watches outgoing mail for new contacts and can white-list Cc: recipients of good mail you get, too.
  • BullGuard Spamfilter supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista.
Guide Review - BullGuard Spamfilter 8.0 - Free Spam Filter
Viruses are very hazardous sometimes. Spam is annoying every day. Should it then not make sense for a virus scanner to come with a spam filter?

BullGuard does include a junk mail filter also available unbundled. BullGuard Spamfilter does not come with much description or prescription, but not much is needed either: if you use Outlook, Windows Mail, Outlook Express or Mozilla Thunderbird, you're set to go. Unfortunately, BullGuard Spamfilter does not work with other email programs, and it does not filter anything but POP accounts in those supported.

After you have chosen your email program, BullGuard Spamfilter starts moving junk mail out of your way. Using "This is spam" and "This is not spam" buttons, you can correct BullGuard Spamfilter's errors easily. For spam not caught, that might be necessary quite regularly.

BullGuard Spamfilter uses both a community filter (messages very similar to what others have marked as spam are identified as junk) and a heuristic method to spot what spam might remain. Fortunately, BullGuard Spamfilter produces few false positives — good mail inadvertently marked as spam.

To further decrease the number of desired emails caught, BullGuard Spamfilter comes with a white list which it diligently tries to keep up to date, too: BullGuard Spamfilter can automatically white-list everybody you mail, and people appearing in the Cc: line of good mail you get, too. Of course, you can easily import addresses from your email program's address book and previously sent mail.

All in all, BullGuard Spamfilter is a straight-forward and quite effective spam filter — as far as its support reaches.

1 out of 5 1 out of 5
Bullguard Spam Filter is BullMay 21, 2009By randy_savage
"Bullguard spam filter is horrible. Horrible at filtering spam. It is better at filtering spam than not filtering it at all, but not by a lot. I installed it after reading a recommendation here at About.com. It installed fairly easily. It offers a minor amount of integration with Outlook Express (the e-mail client I'm using), amounting to some extra buttons in the toolbar. I then trained it with hundreds of e-mails, both spam and non-spam. I carefully sorted e-mail into these categories and went through the prescribed training process. Bullguard didn't learn much. I don't know if the issue is with the ""community"" aspect of the filtering, or the training, but it catches so little spam that it is essentially worthless. The statistics it provides are: out of 1065 scanned e-mails, 19 were filtered as spam by Bullguard. That's after training. Of those 1065 e-mails, more than 1000 were actually spam. That's less than a 2% success rate. 2% success is a miserable failure no matter how you measure it."
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