14 DAY TRIAL // I am sure that everybody knows what spam is all about. Even if you're hungry, the canned ham that goes under this name since 1937, when the term was registered by Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in the United States, shouldn't be your primary concern. Unsolicited and unwanted mail, known as spam since 1993, now that should be a real concern for every user of at least one email account!
Unsolicited email has become in the last years a real plague, together with the ever-increasing amount of viruses in the wild. The subject is hot on a lot of discussion boards, magazines and specialized Web sites, so if you want to find out more about the subject, you're free to google for it as long as you wish, while I am going straight to my target.
SPAMfighter Pro 4.6.3 is my main topic here, and the version that I have installed already is a 30 day trial, after which the program will turn into the Standard version, allowing you to use it for free as long as you like. The installation kit is 10.6MB in size and requires you to use Outlook as email client, because it only works with it, for now.
Once the program has been installed, you will notice a toolbar that appeared inside your email client's interface and a new mail folder, called SPAMfighter. Using it, you can block or unblock an email message, sending it to the spam folder, but also access the advanced options of this program. Let's talk about these now.
The Client Settings area allows you to select your language from those available, almost twenty in number, but here you can also choose the type of your Internet connection.
The Filter Settings area is much richer when talking about options, and first one that you can change is the sensitivity of the spam filter, the available settings ranging from Very Soft to Very Hard.
The Blacklists & Whitelists area lets you choose the email addresses and domains that you want to receive email from or block. The whitelist is automatically filled with all the addresses that you received messages from and those emails are located in your Inbox when installing the program.
When adding an item to one of these lists, be careful to press the Apply button because otherwise your changes won't be recorded, and I found it very annoying to see that sometimes the Apply button is greyed out and you can't do much about it.
Language Recognition is a great feature, allowing you to receive or reject only the emails written in the language(s) that you specify. It would be interesting to see how this program behaves when an email is written half in a language that is allowed, and the other half in a banned language...but I'll leave this task to you.
Last interesting area today is the one called Statistics, and its purpose should be obvious. Here, you will get information about the activity performed on your computer, the overall SPAMfighter community statistics and communication statistics.
These being said, let's move to the conclusions.
The Good
SPAMfighter is easy to use, has a nice interface and integrates nicely with Outlook. The interface of this program is nicely done and has a fresh look.
The Bad
Just before starting writing these conclusions, the application crashed. The problem with changing the whitelists and blacklists items can get really annoying, and I noticed a small delay when starting Outlook, which shouldn't happen on a decent system. Last and worst, I think this is too expensive for what it does, in my opinion.
The Truth
I wouldn't pay for a spam filter, no way! I can filter incoming mail myself, without losing more than 30 seconds per day, but for some people this kind of program can be a necessity. If you are one of those, take your time to check this out, it may save you a lot of time.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
