SPAMFighter: You're Not Alone in the Fight Against Spam Stiff Competition Abounds Adam Stone
Stiff Competition Abounds
SPAMFighter is hardly the only product competing in this realm. Even freebie email services like Yahoo! Mail now offer their own level of spam protection, although the proprietary systems of course claim tougher standards and more rigorous blocking.
Take for instance Ella For SPAM Control, a product that asks each user to train the blocker by showing it examples of wanted and unwanted mail. Ella analyzes over 100 attributes of each message to understand what you think is spam, and continues learning with each incoming message. The downside here is that the training requires some up-front work by the user. On the plus side, it's free.
Also free is a program called SpecificMAIL, which makes the somewhat unlikely claim of being able to block 100 percent of spam. The premise here is that for any piece of suspicious mail, the program fires off a query to the sender in order to ensure that the mail came from a live human source. If the mail passes that hurdle, the user then has the option of allowing mail from that sender to get through. The potential negative here is that the program is a bit high-touch on the user's part (and especially so on the senders' parts).
Now let's get back to SPAMFighter, whose chief defect is that it is, in itself, a form of ad-ware. The free personal version of the program attaches a promotion for itself to the bottom of all outgoing emails. Some users have been less than delighted by this self-promotion, while others may feel it's a fair trade for an application that is both useful and free.
Some users have complained that the program crashes Outlook Express periodically, but these incidents may be idiosyncratic. (If they were endemic it's unlikely the user base would remain high for long.) A greater concern is the program's inability to catch every single piece of spam every time, along with the rare mistake of identifying and blocking real messages as spam.
But let's face it, no spam blocker can be 100 percent foolproof — it is literally and simply impossible. Spammers evolve their techniques daily, finding new ways to cloak their junk in order to evade the automated filters and algorithms meant to keep them at bay.
This is where SPAMfighter's human-based architecture gives it an edge over many of the competing products. Rather than scanning endlessly for strings of capital letters, or messages sent from obscure Chinese senders, or words like "housewives" and "bigger," the program asks the end user the basic question that lies at the heart of all spam blocking efforts:
Is this spam?
If it is, the user has the dual satisfaction of stopping the message in its tracks, while simultaneously helping to shut down its delivery to more than a half a million others who are equally weary of sifting through the endless heaps of work-at-home schemes that really do work, custodians of Nigerian millionaires in duress, and, of course, the ever-intriguing enlargement of body parts.
Pros: Freeware, identifies spam based on direct input from the user community, thorough and accurate filtering system
Cons: Personal edition adds a self-promotional tag to all outgoing mail, requires active participation by the user in order to support the overall effort, only functions as a filter for Outlook or Outlook Express
