SpamKiller 6 Review Overall Rating:

Description

This is going to be a very short review. Well, to be more precise it isn't even going to be a review. This is because we battled for over an hour and a half trying to get this thing installed and working on our test machines - and failed.

We have never had so much trouble trying to get an application installed on a machine and I suspect we may have even more trouble getting rid of all traces of it afterwards!

Trying to get the download from McAfee started was like pulling teeth. Their web site was excruciatingly slow. After waiting what felt like a year or so to get any response, we tried with a different browser only to be informed that it needed Internet Explorer to download the trial.
"Strange", we thought... "Oh well, back to IE and wait..." and wait... Finally we got to a page that told us we needed to click a special link in an e-mail that had been sent to the address we provided when we first registered for the trial download.

OK, off we went, found the e-mail, clicked on the link - and waited... OK, we are at a shopping cart! "Hey, there's a download button! Quick, click it!...." and finally about 5 minutes later we were presented with this:

An ActiveX control is required to download the trial installation. "Ah, that's why you insist on Internet Explorer. Funny, everybody else manages to provide downloads without ActiveX controls... Oh, come on McAfee, we're aging here, we just want the program..."

OK, we're now getting quite smug with how patient we are being - all for the sake of our eager review readers. We'll say yes to the ActiveX control... Oops! Internet Explorer blocked a pop-up. We waited - nothing happened. That pop-up must have been important. We temporarily allowed pop-ups and refreshed the page... OK, the ActiveX control finally started downloading. We sent out for coffee and cakes - this was proving to be a long day...

After another month or so (we had lost all judgment of time by this point), the download finally started:

A flurry of activity followed where our security warned us about 5 or 6 things that the install was attempting to add to our start up.

"Security Center? We don't want no Security Center - we just want the blessed Spamkiller guys! Oh, and here's a message stating that the McAfee security center will cause problems with the Windows XP security center so we had better disable the XP one. Lovely..."

OK, deep breaths - click "yes, yes, yes, yes, yes". Phew! Yippee! Something finally happened! We were given a wizard to add e-mail accounts. OK, fine - fill in the details and hit "Test". We waited (now there's a surprise)... We worked out that we had supplied the wrong password, but it didn't tell us that it couldn't log in to the server, it just sat there.

OK, we hit the back button, corrected the mistake and all was fine. We went to add another e-mail address - it told us that this one has already been added - no it hasn't - and it's not shown in the list!?

"OK, forget it - we're getting angry now. Let's just open up Outlook and see what happens..."

"Ooh, what's this just popped up?"

"Huh? Aw come on! Guys! WE JUST WANT THE %^#* SPAMKILLER!!!" We already have an anti virus and this install is harder to deal with than some of the viruses we've seen anyway!

"Never mind - think happy thoughts... - Outlook is starting, it's going to be all done soon. We can get down to some serious investigation and testing..."

"Arghh! Forget it, bye bye, au-revoir." For reasons of preservation of sanity this review is officially being terminated.

Yes, this could be an isolated incident with this copy of the software and this machine, but even discounting all the issues we have experienced, the jumping through hoops to get the download, the painfully slow web site, the insistence on installing myriads of things we didn't ask for - especially adding to the startup, this thing feels more obtrusive than the worse spyware we've experienced - and we never even got the thing to work!

McAfee, with your running rough-shod over our computer, painfully slow web-site, hi-jacking our start-up and generally badly behaved software you have the dubious honour of earning our first ever 0 out of 5 rating!

"Now, let's see if we can clear up this mess...." Oh, and, of course, they don't provide an uninstaller...

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