Spamologist Review Overall Rating:

Description

Spamologist is a proxy type filter using content-based filtering and whitelist/blacklist filtering both from internal kept lists and internet blacklists (RBLs).

It is unusual in that (as far as we can tell) it installs a Pop3 and SMTP server on your machine. And redirects calls from your regular e-mail client to these local servers by means of placing entries in a LMHOSTS file on your local machine. If none of that made much sense to you - don't worry - it's not important.

It can send challenges to messages (either good or bad ones), which have to be answered either by return of mail or by visiting the Spamologist web site before a message is automatically "released" to be picked up by your regular e-mail client.

Verdict

Unfortunately, this is not going to be one of our better reviews. We normally keep spam filters on our machines for at least a week for thorough testing. Spamologist has been on our test machine for 2 hours and it's soon coming off!

We really wanted to like this - we really did. Unfortunately it didn't like us. Read on...

Installation

Installation seemed to go quite smoothly. Halfway through installation we were presented with the following message box:

We duly visited the Spamologist site where we clicked a link to the Microsoft site to download the patch - dead link. Back to the Spamologist site where we downloaded it from the "mirror" site.

OK, reboot the computer and back to Spamologist...

During installation, Spamologist presents a wizard to make initial settings for its filtering and sensitivity.

Spamologist does not automatically import e-mail account information from Outlook so we had to add these manually. No big problem except that in the meantime we got nosey and clicked the "Quarantine" tab on the main form:

Every time we did this, Spamologist locked up and the task needed to be killed in task manager. OK, no big deal, we'll press on because it's just so pretty...

Interface

Overall, Spamologist presents a clean and attractive interface (the nurse icon really is quite endearing).

Most forms and dialogs seem aesthetically pleasing and intuitive to use, but the whole experience gave us a feeling that Spamologist is a product that will one day - with a little more effort - be very nice indeed. Just not yet though.

Gripes interface wise? Well, a little thing, but every time we open up the main form (seen above) by double-clicking on the icon in the task bar, we drag the form from the top left of the screen to the middle. Next time we do it - it's back in the top left corner again. Where we left it last is not remembered.

There is a help file. We know because that is the first thing we read start to finish, but we tried in vain to get it to show by clicking on the "Help" button on the main form. It does show though in some of the minor forms and by using the help menu. Talking of the help file, we really could do with a high level explanation of exactly how Spamologist works.

Overall, the interface is very pleasing but lacks something in usability. We would like, for instance to be able to maximise the main form so that we could see more information about the killed messages:

Seeing half the from column, half the subject column, most of the status column and nothing else is really not ideal when we could maximise the form and see much more. There is also a received column hidden off to the right, but you would have to scroll right to bring it into view. Can't we just maximise the form please?

Features and Operation

The basic premise of operation is as follows:

Spamologist connects to your e-mail servers at intervals of 3 minutes (this is not user configurable). Using a combination of built-in and user-defined filters and Internet black list checking, a message is flagged as good or bad.
Depending on your challenge/response settings (more on this later), challenge e-mails are sent out which require the user to either visit the Spamologist's servers and confirm the e-mail, or reply to the challenge messages. These messages are then "released" for retrieval using your regular e-mail server.

What happens when you open your regular e-mail client is that your request to connect to the e-mail server is actually redirected to the local Pop3 server that Spamologist has created on your machine. This local server only contains the messages that have made it through the Spamologist's defences.

It is actually a simple and quite ingenious method as it circumvents the problem that usually occurs with proxy type filters in that both the filter and the e-mail client can be trying to retrieve the e-mail at the same time. If the regular e-mail client gets there first, then no filtering will occur. This method means that you don't have to turn off your auto-checking on your regular e-mail client as it will only ever see what Spamologist deems it shall see.

Back to the challenge/response: Spamologist gives you the choice of sending challenges (confirmation requests or turing tests) in the following ways:

• Don't send
• Always send unless the user is in your "allow' list
• Only send to messages that are not diagnosed as spam
• Only send to messages that are diagnosed as spam

Quite a few choices, but this does afford quite a bit of flexibility - even to go into total "whitelist" mode where you only accept messages from known senders - every body else gets the chance of answering the automated challenge - really quite nice.

Unfortunately, on this particular install, on this particular machine, Spamologist is really not playing nicely. Currently we have a regular 3 minute sound telling us that we have 8 unread messages waiting for us. Trouble is - we can find no way to actually see them. They are not in Outlook and they are not in the Spamologist interface. Outlook has crashed twice after opening it by double-clicking on Spamologist's new mail indicator. Oh dear...

Accuracy

From the few message that we have received so far (20), we have had 3 false positives. We will go no further with accuracy comparisons as we have far too little data to go on. Unfortunately, we probably won't because it is shortly to be uninstalled.

Conclusion

As we said at the beginning of this review: we really do want to like Spamologist.
The basic premise on which it is built seems very sound. The interface is fresh and pleasing, but it has proved to be too "flaky" in our testing.

Could it be that this product was released to early? We think possibly yes judging by some glaring omissions such as the main help button not working.

We have some issues with basic usability in places and unfortunately it really didn't want to play nicely on our test machine (we actually uninstalled and re-installed it twice).

Could this have been an isolated incident? Possibly. This is the beauty of the shareware model (try before you buy). If you have the time, why not download the trial version and give it a shot yourself?

We, however, have already given it our best shot - more than we have other products that got uninstalled before even making it to the review. We will be watching the product carefully as we truly believe that it has some good potential once the "creases" are ironed out of it and maybe one day we'll be able to test it again. In the meantime, unfortunately, it really can't have that much of a recommendation from us.

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