SpamEater Pro - Keep Your Inbox Spam-Free

For $24.95 SpamEater Pro is one of the better anti-spam products available. SpamEater is easy to use and takes very little time to configure. Its ease of installation and effectiveness makes it an excellent choice for blocking spam.

You can also download a 30 day free trial to evaluate the product before deciding if it meets your needs.

Installation went smoothly and there were no issues installing or running the program on Windows XP or on Windows Vista. During the set up SpamEater launches a Profile Wizard to guide you through the steps of adding an email account that you want SpamEater to monitor. During this process you will need to know the name of your ISP's POP3 (incoming mail) and SMTP (outgoing mail) servers along with your login name and password for your account. Basically, all the same information you would use if you were setting up an email client such as Outlook or Outlook Express. If you don’t have all of your settings handy you can print out a worksheet during this step or write down all of the information you need before proceeding.

Once installation is complete there is very little configuration needed to get started blocking spam. You can always go back and make changes to the settings afterward.

Because SpamEater connects directly to your mail server you can use it with any email client and you don’t need to take any extra configuration steps after you launch your email program.

Although the installation is very straightforward, the Profile Wizard only allows you to set up one email account during the setup. If you want to add more accounts you’ll need to do that through the Account Profiles section of the user interface after SpamEater has installed. The Profile Wizard also lacks an option to indicate if your mail server requires an encrypted connection (SSL).

The installation wizard doesn’t have the ability to import your email settings from an existing email client like some of its competitors. This can be a drawback if you have multiple email accounts like I do. Configuring all of my accounts to work with SpamEater was a slow process.

SpamEater offers a number of sophisticated features designed to block all types on incoming junk mail before they ever reach your inbox. The program comes with a wide array of built-in filters and rules that are constantly being updated. You can even set up your own rules and filters through its uncomplicated user interface. The pre-packaged filter types include looking at header fields, country codes, message subjects, scanning the body of messages for known spam and checking blocked senders lists, which you can easily add to.

SpamEater notifies you of incoming messages which are initially tagged as (A)ccepted, (F)lagged for your review or (E)aten. You can review these messages and add them to an approved or blocked senders list before either releasing them to your inbox or leaving them marked as spam. If you forget a message, or decide later that you want to allow a message through, you can open the message archive in the user interface and recover the message or add it to your approved senders list. If you want more automated control over the program you can change the rules to always accept certain messages, flag messages or even delete messages immediately.

To ensure that email from friends and family always get through you can import your address book from your email program and add all of the names to the approved senders list. There are a number of address book formats currently supported such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Windows Address Book formats.

In addition to whitelist support and content-based filtering, the real advantage of using SpamEater is its real-time blacklist checking. Messages are reviewed against online databases of know spammers, such as SpamCop.Net and many other blacklist servers. You can also add additional blacklist servers to the list under the filters setting. You can also chose to bounce and email an send an error message back to the sender.

For the most part, there are very little features that are missing in SpamEater Pro that other comparable products offer. For users with multiple email accounts, or users that don’t know all of their email settings, not being able to import all of your existing settings from your email program can take you a while to get SpamEater up and running.

SpamEater Pro works separately from your email client detecting spam before it ever reaches your inbox. Once SpamEater is working you will need to remember not to leave your email program open. Doing so may allow spam to sneak through if your email client and SpamEater are set to check for incoming messages at different times.

Although SpamEater Pro works with a number of different email clients it will not work with MSN or AOL. Your email accounts must use POP3 servers in order for SpamEater to be able to connect to them.

I also noticed that SpamEater doesn’t do automatic updating of its rules and filters. You need to choose Help -> Check for Updates, from the mail toolbar in order to get the latest filters installed.

SpamEater includes the ability to bounce emails and send an error message back to the sender but I’ve always read that spammers can often detect false error messages and that doing this only confirms that the email address is active. There’s also no way to see what the error message is that SpamEater is sending.