SpamEater Pro 4 - A Superb Anti-Spam Tool

SpamEater Pro 4, from Colorado-based High Mountain Software, supports all known POP3 mail services and works to block spam at the mail server level. SpamEater Pro 4 relies on your defined “white” and “black” lists of authorized and blocked senders, the regular updates from several spammer blacklists on the Internet, and settings the user can customize.

Since experience tells us that spam blockers are only as good as the rules emplace to govern their actions, it helps that SpamEater Pro 4 presents you with a list of each sessions’ blocked mail. This helps “legitimize” messages from services you have just signed up for or new correspondents, both of which might be irrevocably lost if you left it all up to your ISP or mail-server administrator.

A nice touch is that SpamEater Pro 4 understands your frustration with the time you have to devote to cleaning out your Inbox at the start of your workday and how  you wish you could just stop the spam from coming in altogether. This you can do because SpamEater Pro 4 readily generates SpamCop complaint forms.

At $24.95, SpamEater Pro 4 is aggressively priced. Among recognized spam-filtering programs on the market, it's undercut solely by “IHateSpam” and “Spam Buster,” both at the all-too-familiar $19.95 price point. That minor price difference masks the fact that SpamEater Pro 4 has a much better feature set.

What's Hot: 

Installation of SpamEater Pro 4 zips by quickly, taking about a minute and a half even on a CPUs below the Core Duo class and comparatively limited memory. That is the good news. [See INSTALL START.JPG and INSTALL FINISH.JPG]

What's Not: 

If you have never set up a spam filter before, deciding on all the setup options and filter rules for SpamEater Pro 4 could take an hour or two. Save time by procuring your incoming and outgoing email server settings information beforehand. For Google’s Gmail service, for example, you have “pop.gmail.com” as your incoming mail server and “smtp.gmail.com” for outgoing. Otherwise, it is easy enough to follow the setup instructions. [See POPMAIL.JPG AND SETTINGUP.JPG]

What's Not: 

This is the greatest disappointment with SpamEater Pro 4. The no-frills interface looks almost exactly like Windows Explorer in XP. One wishes High Mountain Software had taken the time to give such a full-function spam filtering program a front end with the power user, who will get the best use out of Spam Eater Pro, in mind. [See STARTUP.JPG image]

SpamEater Pro 4 is indeed a powerful spam filtering utility. Using eight categories, users can create multi-layer filters to their liking. By way of example, here are five global filters:

Approved Senders: Here users can input email addresses or websites they wish to receive mail from. Using this feature allows email from reliable or wanted sources access to your inbox without fail.

Blocked Senders: Works like approved senders feature, except that mail coming from the supplied addresses or websites are immediately marked as spam and will then be trashed by Spam Eater Pro 4.

Message Subject: This feature filters Spam using the message subject. Get rid of those ubiquitous male enhancement, diet pill, and Cialis announcements you never signed up for.

Message Body: This feature filters spam through the content of the mail. By all means, include all the objectionable keywords you have set up for “Message Subject.”

Country Code: This feature blocks spam using the web domain from which the mail is coming from. No more Nigerian scams, for instance.

Once a message is determined to be spam or fails any of the defined checks, it can be quietly deleted from the server or bounced back to the sender (new to this version). You could also have the spam archived locally and deleted from the server and/or easily paste it onto SpamCop web forms for generating complaints to the sender's and advertiser's ISPs. You decide which option suits you the best.

In comparing SpamEater Pro 4 with standalone McAfee Spam Killer, Spam Buster, and Mail Washer, I found the High Mountain Software entry unique for supporting:

1) SSL-secured POP3 and SMTP systems.

2) The fairly new Sender Policy Framework (SPF, an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery, specifically by masking the return path).

3) Local archive of deleted messages.

4) An open API to let third-party developers import Approved Senders database.

5) Address-specific blocking.

6) Protection from linked-tracking scripts in HTML messages.

[See FILTERS.JPG image]

SpamEater Pro 4 checks email according to a set schedule without hogging up too much RAM or slowing down the performance of other tasks too much. Other than this, Spam Eater Pro 4 runs smoothly. After the mail checks, the program displays a list with flags on them: an (F) means that SpamEater Pro requires the approval of the user before taking action on the item, an (E) means that the filter already considers it as spam and will deal with it as expected, and an (A) means the item is “accepted” or has passed the rules check. All in all, SpamEater Pro 4’s performance was outstanding. It filtered with 85 percent accuracy. This is very close to the 90 percent effectiveness High Mountain Software claims. Doubtless, the more custom settings you input, the closer SpamEater Pro 4 gets to 100 percent success. [See CHECKFORUPDATES.JPG and PROFILES.JPG images]

As soon as SpamEater Pro 4 is installed, the help manual for setting up the program is immediately presented to you. The manual is 100% effective in helping even the most technologically-challenged operator. From start to finish, the program walks you through the entire process of setting up Spam Eater Pro 4. [See BUILT IN HELP.JPG HERE]