What's Hot: CA Anti-Spam is a component of CA's flagship home offering, CA Internet Security (which is also reviewed here on BrightHub). When you install Anti-Spam, The installer will actually include CA's Security Center. Since the package only includes Anti-Spam, the Security Center shows most of the applications as "not installed." The only issue here is that the red circle with the "X" in it makes it look like there's a problem and that could be misleading.
[caspam_features_securitycenter.JPG]
CA Anti-Spam includes a mail search feature in addition to spam management. When you first launch your mail program after installing Anti-Spam, you are guided through a wizard that enables you to set up which mail program you want to use, search options, and indexing.
[caspam_features_spamwizard1.jpg]
Anti-Spam installs a toolbar into your email application that can be used to instantly and in real time block or approve mail, search mail, and set options.
[caspam_features.toolbar.jpg]
The spam filter operates on a model where senders are first untrusted and the user must explicitly trust senders in order for them not to be filtered. The mail is put in a protected "quarantined" folder where the user must explicitly trust the senders. When I first set up my POP3 account with the spam filter running, all the mail was immediately filtered (it could have been because I didn't have any addresses in my address book).
Once senders are trusted or blocked, they can be managed using utilities available from the toolbar. The Approved Senders utility lists all senders you've explicitly approved and allows you to delete users from the list and even change properties like the listed name or the email address. You can add new names and addresses from this dialog box as well. The utility includes a useful tool that scans any specified folder for approved senders. If you point the tool to a specific folder that contains mail, the tool will grab the addresses from that mail and add them to your approved list. From this utility, you can also export and import approved addresses and search for names or addresses.
[caspam_features_approve_senders.JPG]
From the Options menu, you can modify how Anti-Spam warns you of issues, set a scheduled for reminders, modify search options, and turn features off and on.
[caspam_features_options.JPG]
The level of control seems appropriate for an application of this type. One interesting option that CA included is a spam-scoring utility. This allows you to "train" Anti-Spam to assign a number to incoming messages that is the relative probability that the message is spam. You can then tell Anti-Spam to automatically block messages with a certain score and above and automatically approve messages with a certain score and below. Training involves pointing Anti-Spam to a specific folder or folders with known spam and pressing the Train button. Anti-Spam then uses internal algorithms to determine how to rate incoming mail.
[caspam_features_spamscore.JPG]
The Web Inspector's link evaluator is interesting and probably the most innovative feature in the package.
What's Not: I found one minor drawback with the Approved Senders utility. If you delete users from the "approved" list, they are not added to the "blocked" list. While I'm not sure I'd want Anti-Spam to automatically make this decision for me, it do think that an option box would be in order so that you could choose whether to block the names you're deleting from the list. Similarly, deleting a name from the blocked senders list doesn't add it to the approved senders list.
Unfortunately, Anti-Spam doesn't work with HTTP mail through Outlook Express. This seems like a big oversight particularly given the audience. Still, since most web mail is already spam filtered at the server, perhaps the usefulness of a client-side spam filter is attenuated.
The biggest deficiency I see with the product is the lack of an attachment manager. All attachments, even those in mail marked as spam, are active and "clickable." Other modern virus and spam programs will deactivate attachments and embedded images for a number of reasons. Images in an email, for example, can be used as a beacon for spammers informing them that an email account is active. When a user clicks on an HTML email with embedded images, even to preview it, the email application has to go out to the source server to retrieve the images (just like a web page has to do). Spammers can use this round trip to detect the source email address and log that as an active account to which it can send more spam.
