SpamDefender
Spam Fighter isn’t quite the best rated spyware engine out there, don’t get me wrong, it works, but it missed a few things. Keeping that in mind, I downloaded it for the 15-day free trial and installed it. It updated and I went to work with it. The installer is a modest 632Kb and the setup was a breeze, the program will consume about 1MB of space fully installed on your computer. To use Spam Defender, you need to configure all of your e-mail addresses to work with it. You do this by adding them into Spam Defender’s list of your e-mail addresses. I am going to go out on a limb and say that Spam Fighter works as sort-of a proxy between your e-mail servers and you, though the e-mail ends up in your inbox without you having to modify the configuration of your server.
The main selling point that I could find about Spam Fighter is that it allows the user to find and delete unwanted junk mail before it reaches the inbox. In order to help the user in doing this, the program features programmable filters which guide the user in that. You can match e-mail based on the sender (e-mail address), the sender’s name, or the body content of the e-mail. To test this, I fired up a Windows Virtual Machine and set about configuring Outlook and Spam Defender. I set the program to catch all e-mail originating from Hotmail and to catch e-mails that seemed suspicious. Then went to Hotmail and opened an account, I then began sending myself lots of e-mails with website content copy/pasted and I wrote some gibberish in a few. The good news is that none of the Hotmail traffic got through, so we know that the program’s block feature works, but the content based engine didn’t work so well. I had very mixed results when I started getting actual content e-mails. Some of the e-mails had actual words and some had the copy/pasted website content. I worry when I get mixed e-mails coming into my test e-mail box because the only sure way to prevent a virus, malware, or spyware infection is to block it before it even gets to your computer. To aid this, Synergisticsoft, the makers of Spam Fighter have included automatic daily updates which keep Spam Fighter up to date and defending your computer. In addition to the user defined rules, Spam Fighter also looks at the e-mail for embedded code, which will run as soon as the e-mail is opened. Often these embedded codes are used by spyware and malware authors to download programs to the user’s hard drive without the user’s consent.
In closing, Spam Fighter is good at what it does. It does take time to get everything configured exactly, but once you’ve done that, it is a nice program. The automatic update feature is nice and the program integrates with Outlook easily enough. I would use this program in addition to another, perhaps an antivirus which has no real time mail protection.
