G-Lock SpamCombat Review Overall Rating:

Description

SpamCombat is a "Proxy" type filter that runs in the user's system tray and periodically checks the user's accounts independently of their usual e-mail client. Filtering is a combination of content-based, Whitelist/Blacklist and Bayesian.

Verdict

SpamCombat is very much the "thinking person's filter". It has a rather steep learning curve and lots of options which necessarily adds to the complexity of the application. It will not reach optimum efficiency until some time after first use, but nonetheless it is a comprehensive solution that should provide all a pro-active spam warrior would need.

Occasionally, an application can come along that may not be exactly "plug and play", but over time will gather an ardent "hard-core" user base due to its overall power and flexibility. We would expect SpamCombat to be such an application.

It is well worth taking the time to understand the interface and familiarise yourself with SpamCombat's many functions. This will make it seem far less daunting than it may at first appear.

We like proxy type filters and we particularly liked the way SpamCombat doesn't give you a notification until what it considers a legitimate message arrives. Being "nagged" all day about the arrival of spam gets old pretty quickly!.

Overall, a well thought out, effective filter although it didn't quite make the full mark rating for us as it never became as intuitive to use as we would have liked.

Installation

Happily, nothing to report here. Installation went without a hitch and was uneventful.

Interface

As SpamCombat operates as a proxy, all functions are controlled from its own interface rather than integrating into your favourite e-mail client. As is usual with this type of program, closing it by clicking the "x" in the top right of the application really only minimises it to the system tray, where it shows as a tray icon. Double-clicking the tray icon will restore the application's main screen.

As with everything we found about SpamCombat, it is extremely configurable. Most windows can be moved around, hidden or shown, pinned in place, set to auto hide, or docked at will. Likewise, toolbars can be moved and docked/undocked as you wish. You can also change the look of the application quite dramatically by changing the overall colour scheme and the toolbar style.

The main toolbar consists of buttons with pleasant graphics indicating common actions, although we did find you had to dig quite deep or resort to the help file to uncover how to perform certain actions.

Fortunately, the help file is well written and manages to provide the answers you require without being too long-winded. Like everything else we found about this program, it demands a certain amount of effort on your part to get familiar with it, but rewards you amply.

Comprehensive statistics are available which outline the performance of each of the program's filter types and performance as a whole.

Here are a few things we particularly liked about the interface:

The pleasing dialog with "quick buttons" for some of the program's main functionality that appears when you hover your mouse over the icon SpamCombat places in the system tray.

For message content viewing, you can toggle message views between HTML format, raw text or decoded HTML by repeatedly clicking the button in the mini toolbar shown below:

For messages that have been filtered by the Bayesian filter, you are shown a list of the "most interesting" words that have been processed for that message by the filter. A nice touch, and further proof that this filter would perhaps appeal to the "techy" type spam warrior out there more than the casual user - and our techy types here think there's nothing wrong with that!

Overall, the interface is well designed but does give comprehensive functionality somewhat at the expense of intuitive and transparent use.

Features and Operation

After having set up your e-mail accounts, SpamCombat will, at intervals defined by the user, check your Pop3 servers for new mail.

New mail will be passed through SpamCombat's range of filters. Messages that fail the filters will be placed into a "deleted items" folder. Messages that SpamCombat considers "good" will be shown in the main program interface. Selecting an item from the list of messages will display the content of the message in the "content" window.

It must be noted here that, as SpamCombat is a proxy mail filter, the best approach would be to either not have your "normal" e-mail client open, or open but with automatic mail checking disabled. If both are open at the same time it becomes a race as to which application gets to the messages first!

SpamCombat's message display facility is very good and most users will rarely find the need to open their usual e-mail client to view a message's content. For legitimate reasons of security, SpamCombat will not display images embedded in HTML.
When a message arrives that you wish to see, or if you wish to retrieve an attachment, simply open your regular e-mail client (which you can do from the SpamCombat toolbar), and read the message there.

Messages that SpamCombat considers non-spam will be left on the e-mail server should you wish to retrieve them using your regular e-mail client. Messages that SpamCombat considers spam will be removed from the server and stored on your local hard drive should you wish to "recover" it (more on this later).

If you consider that SpamCombat can be configured to alert only you when "good" messages arrive and to automatically open your regular e-mail client at that time, you can see that it would provide a very good defence against spam where you are only disturbed when genuine messages arrive. In our opinion, this is the state of affairs to which all spam filters should aspire.

We could not do justice to the full feature set of SpamCombat in the space we have available here. We will content ourselves to give a very brief overview of the individual types of filters that an arriving message has to get through before it is considered worthy of your esteemed attention!:

• Complex Filters - Underneath the hood of SpamCombat, there is a virtual programming language (based on Pascal, so us Delphi programmers should love it) including variables and program flow operators where a savvy users could really hand craft their own filtering. Very impressive, although not at all for the casual user.
• Whitelist - This is not the basic white list operation where friend's addresses are stored to guarantee delivery, but a comprehensive set of content-based filters that can be based on any part of the message. Add to this the fact that filters can be written using regular expressions (an extremely powerful standardised "wildcard" search language), and this becomes is a very powerful feature for the committed spam fighter. Messages that match any of these features will be accepted regardless of other message content.
• Blacklist - Exactly the same as the whitelist functionality described above except the message will be marked as spam should it "trigger" any of the filters.
• HTML Validator - This filter checks the message for valid HTML tags. Spammers often place meaningless HTML tags in their messages in an attempt to fool content-based filters (Via<Boom>gra). If the number of invalid HTML tags exceeds a user-defined number, then the message is marked as spam.
• Bayesian Filter - Probably one of the most powerful of the filters. Bayesian filtering should need no explanation by now, but refer to Bayesian Filtering for an explanation.
• DNSBL Filter - This filter checks the sender's IP address against internet based lists of known spammers.

SpamCombat's Bayesian Filter does not come pre-trained which means two things:
Firstly, it does not come with "pre-conceived" ideas about what is spam and what isn't. This is a good thing since you may be a mortgage consultant and you don't want, for instance, every message canned simply because it has the word "Mortgage" in it!.
Secondly, it will take quite a time (some estimates say 40 days) until it reaches optimum filtering capability - which confirms even more that this is not an "install it and forget it" type application. Bayesian "training" is achieved by the standard practice of selecting an erroneously marked message and clicking the "mark message as clean" or "mark message as spam" buttons.

We mentioned earlier about recovering messages that were incorrectly identified as spam. It turns out that the mechanism for this is rather involved. SpamCombat actually creates a Pop3 e-mail server on your local machine. When you review your deleted messages and decide that one has been wrongly flagged as spam, you move the message into a recoverable folder and then retrieve it using your regular e-mail client after creating a new account which accesses this local server.

Accuracy

Considering the range of user-configurable filters and "tweaking" possible in SpamCombat, in conjunction with the fact that the Bayesian filter arrives "virgin", it proved to be very difficult to reliably and fairly assess this filter's accuracy within the time frame allotted to us.

Because of this, we decided to forgo our usual practice of providing definite accuracy figures. Suffice to say that any filter that uses a well designed Bayesian filtering paradigm should easily achieve accuracy rates in the high 90% range with minimal false positives or negatives.
Add to this the whole host of other filters available in this application and you can see that we have the makings of an extremely powerful barrier to spam.

Conclusion

Spam Combat is the "aficianado's filter". It requires quite an investment in terms of understanding the many features available. It provides only adequate protection out of the box, but with sufficient training of the Bayesian filter and understanding and implementation of a few user-defined filters spam really should become just a distant memory.

We cannot wholeheartedly recommend this filter to casual users who really just want a "plug it in - forget it" solution to their spam problem, but for the computer literate user who really wants total control and flexibility no matter what the spamming community may throw at them in time to come, then this could just be your most formidable weapon!

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