SpamEater Pro Review Overall Rating:

Description

SpamEater Pro is a proxy type filter which filters your messages before you open your regular e-mail client.

Its filtering is performed by content analysis and by the use of internet RBLs or "blacklists". It has the ability to send fake "undeliverable" messages back to the sender in the hope of convincing them your address is invalid.

Verdict

Unfortunately, SpamEater failed to win our tester's hearts. It presents a neat and uncluttered interface, but somehow just didn't become second nature to use. Its content based filters are quite unsophisticated and we found quite a few false positives from the internet blacklists it used.

Overall, we think it is "outgunned" by many products on the market today.

Installation

The 4.8 Meg installation went smoothly. Installation was well thought out and provided a lot of useful "hand holding" during the process, including a print out "worksheet" so that you can go off to find your account information etc..., fill it in the paper form and return when armed with everything you need.

It also presented an impressive array of e-mail clients from which it could import "contacts" to add to your approved senders list, although we could not find a way to review this list later on.

When all is done, a wizard is presented to help create your first account (remember, that as SpamEater is a proxy filter, all e-mail account information has to be filled in here as well as your regular e-mail client.

Interface

While on the whole being pleasant on the eye, we found the interface to be lacking in general usability.

All new messages are presented to the user in the same screen and marked with a colour coded icon denoting its status:

• E: Eaten (Spam)
• F: Flagged (Potential Spam)
• A: Approved Sender

In practice we found that scanning through the message list we were simply reading the subject line to determine whether the message was spam or not - defeating the object of having it filter the spam for you!

You can however, click on the column headers to sort by that column. In this way, you could bring the good messages to the top for viewing, but this will then put them out of received order.
There is the ability to filter the visible messages by clicking on the down arrow to the right of each column. You then will have to remember to reset the filter later on to view all messages.
Altogether, we found this all to be too cumbersome.

We liked the message details form, which will display the messages in various formats, including a separate tab for the message headers and "Raw" message.

Features and Operation

Once your e-mail accounts have been created in SpamEater Pro, then periodically, it will connect to your e-mail server and retrieve your messages. Using a combination of whitelist/blacklist and content-based filtering, the messages will be either allowed through, "Eaten" or "Flagged" as suspicious.

Here, SpamEater does things slightly differently to most. It keeps separate areas for archived messages and recent messages. Whenever it checks the server, any messages that were in Recent Messages from the previous check are moved out of Recent Messages. Messages that were deleted from the server due to being marked as spam are moved to Message Archives and cleared messages are removed from the database. Simple really...

The result of all this is that you should only see new messages (either spam or good) in the recent messages area every time you open the SpamEater Pro interface. This does, however, mean that you have to pay attention otherwise some legitimate messages that it flags as spam (and there were quite a few), will slip past your attention in the blink of an eye if you're not careful!

As well as the built in content filters, you can create your own using a simple form:

This shows up a weakness in our opinion. This is straight "kill word" filtering. Spammers cottoned on to this quite some time ago and go to quite creative lengths to obscure the "Kill words" in their messages to get past this basic type of filtering. After creating the seven hundredth filter for a variation on the word "Cialis" ("C1alis", "Ci@li$" etc...), the novelty wears off pretty quickly!

Most modern content-based filtering systems provide more comprehensive types of content-based filtering with at the very least "wildcard" searches or regular expressions.

Accuracy

Overall, we were disappointed with SpamEater's filtering capabilities. Its content-based filtering is quite basic and easily fooled unless you want to spend a lot of time creating new filters daily. We also found far too many false positives from the blacklists - particularly SPEWS (Spam Prevention Early Warning System - very early!).

The blacklist filtering is, of course, only as good as the lists that you use and, to be fair, you can easily select other lists in SpamEater. This does however show the potential problems in pinning one's filtering ability on external lists such as these - particularly as its main line of defence.

Conclusion

We wish we could have more positive to say about SpamEater Pro. Over time, with a lot of extra user filters, and some different black lists to reference, you should get better results than we did. 92.88% is not too shabby for a spam filter anyway, but 4.3% false positives is something to worry about. However, the accuracy figures reported above do not tell the whole story.
To function efficiently as a spam filter, it should relieve you of continually having to check your "killed mail" folders for false positives. If you can't develop the necessary amount of trust in the application to do only periodic checks, then it probably is time to look for something else. Add to this the fact that checking these folders is not as simple a task as it should be and we find it hard to rate this more.

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