14 DAY TRIAL // Whether your email account is POP3 or an IMAP one you definitely have to face one common threat: spam. It is a simple word but what it defines may in some cases be your worst nightmare as spam clutters your email box with unnecessary messages making it difficult for you to identify the valid ones.
Spam has become more elaborated and complex lately and in many cases it is the cause for computer breakdowns. It generally advertises different products but it is more than often used as a means of transport for viruses, spyware and other sort of malware. Luckily there are tools on the market designed to fight back spam and get rid of all the mail clutter, or at least reducing it within some acceptable limits.
Spamihilator is a freebie specially designed to help you in the combat against spam, leaving your inbox as clean as possible. The application comes as a complex instrument to relieve you of everything, incorporating multiple filters for accurately detecting spam. It works with both IMAP and POP3 email accounts and acts as a proxy, staying between your email client and the email server. Thus all messages coming to your inbox are first filtered by Spamihilator.
Users can check all emails sent to the address and retrieve the false positives missed by Spamihilator. Relying on a simple principle and lots of filters (these can also come as plugins) the application strives to deliver only valid messages and contain all threats and unnecessary emails.
The application works with practically any email client you may use and is extremely easy to use to your advantage. The moment after retrieving the messages from the server Spamihilator places them in Training Area allowing the user to sort the good from the bad. If you want to test its efficiency you can let it pre-mark spam and non-spam messages by itself. You have to know though that its accuracy improves in time due to the Bayesian filter it uses.
All messages in Training Area window can be viewed in plain text for your security and users have the possibility to mark the messaged as valid/invalid by themselves. After all emails have been sorted out the application is ready for a learning session based on the Bayesian method (Learning Filter recognizes non-spam words that indicate valid emails).
The more you use the learning filter the more accurate spam detection will get. If in the beginning of our test Learning Filter could not differentiate between spam and non-spam, as it was put to work it began taking good decisions by itself by building a list of words used in non-spam messages and a list used in spam. This way recognition rate will increase while the number of false positives decreases.
After learning process has been completed Spamihilator will send the good messages to your inbox while the rotten ones are thrown to its own Recycle Bin. All messages in this location are not lost forever as Spamihilator allows you to restore them in case your keen eyes missed a valid item.
In both Training area and Recycle Bin you can view the messages and for each item in the list there are details regarding the filter that tracked it down, the probability of spam as well as date and time of receiving. In the lower part of the window there is additional information like the words that led to the detection of the message.
As for setting up Spamihilator, the application is really flexible offering a wide palette of options for a configuration that best suits your needs. Users can define the period of time the messages should stay in Recycle Bin and enable the spam deleting from the server until they are deleted from Spamihilator's Recycle Bin.
System tray area can be protected by a user-defined password so that only authorized persons can open both Training Area, Recycle Bin and Settings panel. It can also be customized for a different action when it is double clicked (by default it'll open Recycle Bin).
Spamihilator comes with a great list of settings especially for selecting the filters you want to fight spam and their configuration. The default Spam Word Filter comes with a set of pre-defined words and expressions (regular expressions can also be used) and users can enrich it with new spam give-away words adding a spam probability. Unfortunately you cannot create your own list from scratch, which kind of cuts from the flexibility of the application.
Both Spam Word Filter and Learning Filter can be disabled and the latter is configurable in terms of learning from messages from Friends list (white-list) as well as from Blocked Senders (blacklist) and messages restored from Recycle Bin.
Spamihilator supports filter plugins and a list of 29 spam filters can be downloaded directly from the application. The great thing is that by clicking on the listed filters you get to see the appreciation of other users and the number of downloads. A brief description of what the filter is intended for is also available.
Some of the filters are configurable, like Empty Mail Filter which lets you set the minimum number of words a message should contain in order to be considered valid, while others are taken as is with no possibility of customization. But the bright side is that they will do their job.
The flexibility of the software allows for defining which filter should kick in first when an email is received. Spamihilator permits prioritizing different filters the way they best suit you. So, if one filter does not get the spam, the next one in line will. This is the basic principle, but you should be aware of the fact that there may still be false positives.
Plugin filters that come by default in Spamihilator include DCC Filter, Image Filter, Attachment filter and Newsletter plugin. DCC plugin, also called P2P Plugin, uses Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse network in order to identify spam. Practically it verifies if other users in the network have received the same email and if the number exceeds the defined value in its configuration (default is 10) the message will be marked as spam.
Attachment Filter plugin is designed to block messages containing suspicious luggage that may come with a message. By default it looks for a number of predefined extensions that should not be there and if one of them is detected the email will be recycled. Users can complete the list with additional extensions the filter should be on the lookout for.
As for newsletters, you have to append the addresses you receive your newsletters from as these can be easily taken for spam messages, especially if they contain special offers or product presentations. By doing so no valid newsletter will get to Recycle Bin and the application will also learn the pattern for the good ones.
You should have absolutely no problem in setting Spamihilator up and configuring it to your needs as the documentation is abundant and everything is explained thoroughly for every user to understand. The application does a good job with handling emails and sorting them out but if you frequently receive a great deal of messages there will be slip ups.
During our testing, after one week of learning each day the difference between spam and valid emails it definitely reduced the amount of unnecessary mail but it still returned a fair amount of false positives. The downside is that with all the learning the application will still miss one or two messages and you still have to manually sort them out.
The Good
Spamihilator is extremely easy to use and comes prepared with heavy weaponry by making available multiple filters ready to stop the spam from reaching your inbox.
It works like a proxy for both POP3 and IMAP email accounts and can be used with every email client. Detection rate can reach high levels after a while.
The application allows retrieving accidentally deleted messages with absolutely no problem.
The Bad
During our testing, even after one week, there were still false positives and could not be left unattended. You have to constantly check Recycle Bin for wrongfully marked messages and Training Area is the first place to look when new messages arrive.
Spamihilator works great with a smaller amount of daily messages, but when it comes to larger numbers handling the email can become quite difficult and training will take a while longer.
Although the options it comes with provide plenty of functionality and flexibility, these are not enough as Training Area does not have sufficient options for sorting the emails out.
Statistics shows only the total amount of spam your inbox would have to face without Spamihilator although it would be much better to have a general view over the messages accurately detected by Spamihilator and the false positives.
The Truth
Spamihilator is effective from the beginning and in time its performance will definitely increase. However, if you deal with hundreds of emails each day (most of them being spam) it will take a while longer for its efficiency to show and Training Area will become your email preview tool.
Works great, has high detection rates and if you get it used to a certain type of email addresses it will learn the patterns. However, breaking the pattern will render it unreliable in some cases (few of them, indeed) and needs some more learning sessions.
Properly configured it can do a great job but you will still have to check the bin for some false positives as there is a chance for a valid message to have escaped the filters.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
