SpamWeed Review Overall Rating:

Description

SpamWeed is a Bayesian filter that works as a proxy in that it intercepts your message before your regular e-mail client gets to see it. Its administration is provided by its own interface and an icon placed in the system tray.

Verdict

We really did not have much luck with Spamweed. We found regular and frustrating critical errors in the program and an extremely disappointing filtering rate.

Installation

Usually, any problems we see with an application only manifest themselves once the application has been installed. No so with SpamWeed. The install seemed to be going smoothly, but once installed, it automatically entered the wizard to import your address book from your e-mail client.
We were presented with the choice of quite a few programs from which to import. We selected Microsoft Outlook, clicked "Next" and was rewarded with this:

Unfortunately, this kind of thing was to prove to be in no way an isolated incident during our testing.

Interface

Overall, the interface is functional and simple to navigate. Spamweed does not have the "glitz" of some other offerings - not helped by the look of the clip art used in the main navigation panels:

What matters most though, is that the interface is easy and intuitive to get around. This proved to be the case and we had no problem finding what we needed.

Features and Operation

SpamWeed is a Bayesian filter. While there are rudimentary Whitelist/Blacklist capabilities and some content-based filtering, Bayesian filtering remains the core of the filter.

During normal operation, SpamWeed shows itself as an icon in your system tray. Periodically, SpamWeed will check your e-mail servers for any incoming messages, rate them as "spam" or "ham" and notify you of any new good messages.

When a message is incorrectly identified, simply right-clicking the item in the interface and selecting either "Move to Junk Mail" or "Move to Legitimate Mail" will put the message in the correct category and help train the filter to correctly identify similar messages in the future.

Spam messages can automatically be deleted from the SpamWeed interface after a specified period of time.

A useful feature of modern spam filters is a display of spam filtering statistics. SpamWeed presents a configurable display of statistics which can be filtered by e-mail address and by time range.

You can also set SpamWeed to send a daily report on activity to an e-mail address you specify.

Overall, SpamWeed shows promise in its features. During our testing though, we encountered many critical errors and "bugs" which did not help to instill us with confidence.

Now, there may have been something in particular that the application "didn't like" about our test machine (a regular Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with 512 Meg of RAM and running Windows XP Service Pack 2), but we can only report things as we find them. We found the software to be extremely "quirky" at best.

Accuracy

Having reached this stage in our testing, we could have forgiven a lot had the filter returned amazing filtering accuracy figures. Sadly, we did not find this to be the case. 69.82% is a very poor showing among today's spam filters.

Conclusion

In this day of the spam filtering market being dominated by Outlook/Outlook express add-ins, we are always anxious to find a very good spam filter for the "others" that don't happen to use Microsoft's offerings.
We hoped that SpamWeed may have been such an offering, but overall, we were extremely disappointed.

Taking into consideration the many problems we had with this filter as soon as the installation started, and the poor accuracy figures returned, we find it hard to recommend this product. It is marketed as "shareware" though, so you are free to download the trial version and see how it performs for you.

For us though, we feel we are being kind awarding it the two stars that we have.

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