SpamFighter Pro Review Overall Rating:

Description

SpamFighter Pro is a community based filter with Whitelist/Blacklist facility that integrates into Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express and is also available as a server-based version.

Verdict

SpamFighter Pro presents a very clean and pleasing interface and requires the minimum of interaction from the user.
Our test results showed a good low rate of false positives, but we would have been happier with just a little better capture rate than the 90% we tested. Overall though - a very nice product.

Installation

Installation, which came as a Windows installer package, went smoothly without a problem.

After installation, the user is required to create a new account to join the SpamFighter community. This is simply a matter of supplying your e-mail address and choosing a password.

Interface

As with all these types of filters, SpamFighter Pro installs itself as an Outlook add-in and is visible as an extra toolbar in the Outlook/Outlook Express interface:

With a very minimal set of buttons for daily operation there really is no learning curve and the new user will be up and running in no time at all.

All other dialogs are well designed, functional and intuitive.
Always a nice touch in these sort of filters is a statistics display and SpamFighter Pro does offer some rudimentary statistical analysis:

Features and Operation

Operation of SpamFighter Pro really couldn't be simpler. The basic premise of the system is as follows:
When a user receives a message that is spam, they simply select the message and click the "Block" button in the toolbar. This marks the message as spam at the central server, the message is moved into the "SpamFighter" folder and the message is blocked from all other users of the system.

Should a legitimate message be marked as spam (this does happen with community filters and particularly with mailing lists and legitimate bulk mail), then the user simply clicks the "Unblock" button and the message is returned to your inbox.

The only other user configuration available is the whitelist and blacklist facility. As has been mentioned many times before, blacklisting e-mail address seems mostly a pointless exercise as far as anti-spam measures go, but whitelisting e-mail address and complete domains is a very useful and important thing to do with all spam filters.

There is an advanced settings section where the sensitivity of the filter can be adjusted as shown in the screen shot. Quite how this sensitivity is effected given that the messages are simply marked as spam or not is not clear but we left it at the default setting during our week of testing.

Accuracy

The nature of community-based filtering is that it would be impossible to achieve 100% accuracy for everybody. This must be so simply because someone must mark the message as spam in the first place for it to be denied to the rest of the community.

Furthermore, we would imagine there must be some form of latitude introduced into the system. A message being denied to the whole subscriber base just because one person accidentally clicked the wrong button, or forgot that they subscribed to a particular newsletter would seem more than a little harsh.

On their web site, the makers of SpamFighter claim it to be able to detect 80-90% of spam and in this respect our tests met, or exceeded this estimation.

While a 90% detection rate is quite respectable, this figure is bettered by some of the other filters we have tested.

Conclusion

SpamFighter Pro is a simple to use and effective filter. With our past experience of community-based filters, we were expecting a far higher number of false positives and were pleasantly surprised by the exceedingly low number that our test actually showed.

There is some satisfaction to be had in knowing that by marking a message as spam you are potentially stopping that message from being received by thousands of other users.

Is 90% the maximum that could reasonably be achieved using this kind of community filter? Quite probably we think.

Is that a good enough figure? Well, that's up to you. For us, we have an unwritten rule that no filter can be awarded our 5 star rating unless is meets, or exceeds the 95% detection rate in our tests. In all other respects SpamFighter Pro is as good as the best of them.

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