IHateSpam Review Overall Rating:

Description

IHateSpam is a spam filter that integrates with Outlook, Outlook Express, Incredimail and Eudora. The developers do not release many details of exactly the technologies used to perform the spam filtering, but these are known to include Bayesian filtering, Content-Based Filtering, community filtering and Whitelist/Blacklist filtering using Internet based blacklists.

It features a facility to block "explicit HTML graphics" and adult-oriented content messages.

Senders can be send a fake "Undeliverable" report and the filter can assist in compiling a spam complaint.

Verdict

It is clear from the user interface that a lot of work has gone into IHateSpam. It integrates with a wide array of e-mail client applications. The filter presents a comprehensive feature set in a clear manner and the dialogs and interface components are nicely laid out.

It seemed to take quite a while for the filter to start returning decent results and never did quite reach the peak performance we have seen with one or two of the top performing filters.

Overall, a nice offering with some features not available in many other filters, but due to its actual tested performance and other minor irritations, we don't feel moved to give it more than a 3 star rating (OK, 3 and a half then...).

Installation

The trial version of IHateSpam was delivered as a 6.94 Meg download. Installation went without a problem.

During the installation process, you are given the opportunity to select which e-mail clients to use IHateSpam with. Notice the MSN Hotmail integration with Internet Explorer.

Interface

We tested IHateSpam with Microsoft Outlook. Like all these types of filters, IHateSpam places an extra toolbar in the normal Outlook interface:

Here, messages are simply marked as "Not Spam!" or "Is Spam" by clicking the relevant buttons. There are also some buttons to access some often used features of the filter.

Elsewhere, the interface is consistently clean and modern looking as can be seen from the main options form here:

We would have liked to have seen more traditional help available via the ubiquitous "F1" key. Aside from one or two very nice tool-tip hints and pop-up screens, help can only be reached via the IHateSpam menu on the Outlook toolbar, or from the start menu where the program was installed.

Features and Operation

In the main, IHateSpam is designed to work with the bare amount of interaction necessary from the user. Like most of these types of filters, daily use can be limited to simply correcting the messages that the filter mistakenly marks as spam, or not spam.
Delving deeper though will reveal one or two features that may increase the accuracy of the filter, help you become more proactive in your fight against spam, or that simply may be useful to you.

Some of these features include:

• E-mail bug removal - The feature claims to remove the e-mail "bugs" that tell the sender if you have actually read the mail that they sent.
• "Smart Friends" - This feature will add to your friends list the e-mail address of anyone to whom you send a message.
• User defined filters content filters- Very basic "word/phrase search" functionality allowing you to add your own words or phrases to search for in the messages and to perform a certain action on the message if the filter is matched. There is no wildcard facility so it is of limited usefulness in identifying spam, but could be useful in identifying good mail by looking for words that would identify the message as such.
• Statistical Reports - Reports are available on such things as the number of messages, the percentage of those that were spam and how many were "bounced" or reported.
• Spam Reporting - IHateSpam will help you to identify the correct person to whom to send any spam complaints and will assist in creating and sending the message. It can also send your complaints to SpamCop, the internet spam reporting service.

The spam reporting, in particular, we found to be of very limited usefulness. We never did get it to return even one correct address to which to send a complaint (based on our normal header tracing), even on messages with just one "Received" header to decipher.

In the example pictured above, the only recommendation was to send the complaint to lycos.com. This address was taken from the obviously forged "from" address and in actuality had nothing to do with the source of the message. Sending this message would do nothing but annoy the falsely accused.

To be fair, getting a computer program to accurately trace headers and reveal the true source of the message would be an extremely tall order, but we do wonder why the makers of IHateSpam went to such trouble with the reporting functionality when it rarely (never in our case) identifies the correct recipient of the complaint.

We did sometimes find that IHateSpam took a long time to perform some actions, such as when a spam message got through to the inbox and we clicked the "Is Spam" button. At some times, doing this would result in Outlook becoming unresponsive for up to 30 seconds at a time. We don't feel this was a bug exactly as things always returned to normal, it just took its time about things sometimes!

Accuracy

The resulting accuracy figures actually came as quite a surprise to us as we felt that they would be worse than they turned out to be.
This is probably due to the fact that it seemed to take a very long time to reach peak accuracy (there is usually a period of time where a filter that contains a Bayesian component "learns' from your messages until it reaches optimum efficiency) and we seemed to be doing a lot of "correcting" early on in the test.

As it turns out, an accuracy of just about 90% is not too shabby really so the numbers must be left to speak for themselves.

Conclusion

IHateSpam is a full featured spam filter that offers integration with an impressive number of e-mail clients.
It offers some features not to be found on similar offerings and some parental control features that may attract some concerned parents.

Ultimately though, a filter must finally be judged on its accuracy rate and here we found IHateSpam to be lacking. It must be said that a 90% accuracy rate is really quite impressive, but when we are testing filters that regularly achieve better than 95%, that little difference certainly feels like a whole lot when you are daily correcting its mistakes and yearning to grow more confident of its abilities.

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