MailMender Review Overall Rating:

Description

MailMender is a content-based filter. It works as a proxy filtering your e-mail behind the scenes before it reaches your inbox. It features an "intelligent search" functionality that detects and beats spammer's attempts at "obfuscating" words and can automatically perform challenge/response filtering on subject e-mails, requiring that the user confirm any suspect messages.

Verdict

We were very impressed with MailMender. This product proves that traditional content-based filters can still provide excellent spam protection, despite spammer's attempts to fool them.

This is a well thought out filter and we particularly liked the very powerful "Intelligent Search" facility. If a filter exists for the word: "Viagra", MailMender will automatically find variations and "obfuscation" attempts such as: "V1@gra", "V|i|a|g|r|a", "Via<boom>gra" etc..., and the special filters section that detects "give-away" signs that a given message may be spam.

Good use of the Challenge/Response model means that challenges are only sent when a message is suspected as being spam. This is far less "heavy handed" than the normal "whitelist" based challenge/response filters, but still relieves the user from constantly checking their "killed mail" folder.

Installation

Installation went smoothly. Once installed, MailMender automatically stars a wizard to help you set up your first e-mail account.

Interface

MailMender presents a purposeful, uncluttered interface which makes up for what it may lack in "glitz" in intuitive usability.

Throughout, MailMender's interface is clear. Often used functions are clearly available from the main Toolbar and/or menu items and the system is supported by a comprehensive help file and "Tip of the day" hints with some interesting "factoids" relating to spam thrown in.

Features and Operation

Having set up your e-mail accounts (a wizard helps your through this process), MailMender simply sits in the background periodically checking, and cleaning your e-mail server on you behalf. Manual checks can be performed at any time.

MailMender acts as a "proxy", so normally resides in the system tray as an icon:

This icon changes to indicate current state such as new messages arrived (it will periodically check your e-mail server for you behind the scenes), spam killed etc... and the tool tip help changes to display how many new spams, new messages etc... have been found since you last opened the program's main form.

As with all "Proxy" type filters, it is recommended that you close your regular e-mail client, or disable auto-checking on it otherwise both applications will try to get the messages, reducing your spam filtering ability.
For legitimate reasons of security, MailMender displays messages in text-only format. We find this quite adequate for reading of most e-mail messages. Should you wish to retrieve attachments or view images, simply retrieve the message using your regular e-mail client.

New mail notifications can be set and different sounds can be selected for each event so that, for instance, a particular sound could signify to you a good message arriving from a particular account.

When you close MailMender, it actually just hides the main form and stays running in the system tray. Double-clicking the MailMender icon will restore the application's main screen.

Messages that MailMender considers "good" are left on your e-mail server, should you wish to retrieve them using your regular e-mail client. Spam messages are removed from the server and, optionally, stored locally should you wish to retrieve them.

"Rescuing" messages that may have been accidentally marked as spam can be achieved by the simple mechanism of re-sending the message back to you with special "marker" in it to ensure it will be accepted this time round.

MailMender comes with many pre-configured filters and it is a simple, wizard-based operation to create fresh filters yourself from any new spams that happen to make it through.

We found that the features that make MailMender so powerful were the "Intelligent Search" facility, which does an amazing job of unraveling spammer's "obfuscation" of words, and the special filters, which detect signs that the message is spam from common indicators.

As shipped, many of these special filters are not enabled, so it is worth taking some time to look them over and selectively enable them once you understand what their purpose is.
One of these filters is worthy of special attention: If you have Microsoft Word installed on your machine, then MailMender can "borrow" its dictionary and count the spelling mistakes in a message. Excessive spelling mistakes turn out to be quite an accurate indicator of spam and you can set the threshold of the spelling mistake count over which the message may be considered as spam.

Finally, MailMender can send out what it calls "Turing Tests" to suspect messages. This message contains a special code which the recipient must insert into the message subject when they reply to ensure that the message "makes it through" this time.
Now, some people argue that this type of mechanism is a bad idea in that it clutters up the internet, and sends a message that "my time is more important than yours" to the recipient.
While there is some value in these arguments, we think that intelligent and selective use of such a mechanism (MailMender only sends these challenges out to messages it considers may be spam) is a definite benefit to the the user who really doesn't want to be continually scanning their "Killed Mail" folder for false positives.

Accuracy

We prepared for our test by importing all lists of contacts, adding some "Accept" filters as recommended by the help system, and removing some pre-existing filters which we could see may create some false positives.

Overall, content-based filters tend to produce more false positives than Bayesian filters, but this is mitigated slightly by challenge/response system implemented in this product.

Conclusion

Overall, we found MailMender to be an extremely powerful and flexible solution. We like the fact that it isn't tied to a particular e-mail client.
It is not quite as "install it and forget it" as some Bayesian filters are, but it has some quite innovative features such as the "Intelligent Search" functionality and special filters, which help it to product some really quite impressive results.

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