SpamWeed Review by The Software Corner
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Rating:
Overall: 8.9/10
Help files: 9
Features: 9.5
Ease of use: 8.5
Support: 8.5 (online docs etc.)
Stability: NA (Not a beta version)
Introduction:
With the number of spam emails growing by the day, checking your email has become an annoyance for many people. Tons of email are received by your email program and out of those emails, maybe 90% of it is spam.
Spam is just clogging inboxes all over the world, and it has been so frustrating to internet users that the US has created laws. But laws do not do much since the internet is a world wide tool. Laws in the US are only applicable to the US, beyond popular belief, but there are countries that spamming is not illegal. Spamming is such a major annoyance that Bill Gates is trying to come up with a way to eliminate spam.
But there is a bright side to spam, yes eventhough its mostly junk, but the economy is booming because of it. Why? You may ask, it's because companies are competing for the people's money to help rid of their annoyance of spam mail. Mostly all free email accounts have some sort of spam filtering, and even Internet Service Providers as well implement some sort of filtering without you even knowing it!
Although spam filter do vary in functionality, accuracy and extras, they do range in price, from free to over $50. But sometimes spending that extra money for functionality is worth it.
Functionality:
SpamWeed is a spam filter that works with practically any email client, and is quite easy to setup. If you use popular email clients like Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, etc. .. then configuring your email client to work with SpamWeed is very simple. SpamWeed will configure your email client for you.
SpamWeed can filter many email accounts at once, so you're not limited to that only one account of yours for those who do have more than one email account. Setting up your email account(s) is easy in SpamWeed if it does not automatically configure your account. There is a simple example in their help file to show you how to set it up if your email client is not listed.
SpamWeed uses Bayesian filtering method, and it also incorporates other useful features like Blacklists, Whitelists and Keyword lists. Blacklisting alone is an okay feature but its not great for filtering email since if that was the only option available, the spammer has to just change their email address and you'll be stuck in the same situation. SpamWeed also implements a White List feature that will automatically not filter emails from people from your address book thus not mistakening your email as spam. Keywords is a great feature for those who might need to filter emails by subject. Sometimes spamfiltering software might mistaken a popular keyword as spam.
There are quite a few options. If for example you just want to use SpamWeed as your email client, then you have the option of "Deleting messages immediately after receiving" which will in fact stay in t he Legitamite Mail folder of SpamWeed. This will not download your emails to your program, although if you do have this option disabled and an email message is mistaken for spam, you can click on the message and choose the "Move to Legitamite Mail" option and then you will be able to download it to your email client. You can password protect SpamWeed so other people can't mess around with your settings or have the ability to read your emails.
Other features include the ability to preview your spam mail, and view the message source for those who are interested in checking whether or not the email is legitamite or spam. SpamWeed has the ability to filter out virus ridden attachments, noting that this feature does not mean you don't need an antivirus program. More information can be found at the following link.
Conclusion:
SpamWeed is a simple and fully featured spamfiltering product. I have been using it for a while and have enjoyed it. So far it has lived up to its expectation of filtering accuracy of 95%, in fact it has filtered 100% of my spam mail on all email acocunts. Note that you do not have to filter all your accounts if you do not want to which is great leaving you the option of which emails to filter.
I do like the keyword exception so that emails with those keywords will not be accidently mistaken for spam. Another great feature is taking your address book and making those email addresses ?white listed? so that emails will not be filtered.
Overall SpamWeed is a great program especially one that supports many email clients and will work with practically any email client. It's a very good program and I have enjoyed testing and using it.
About Shuttle Technologies & SpamWeed
Shuttle Technologies (previously Lanfei), a leading anti-spam vendor located in Shanghai, china, has been dedicated to the fight against email spam since early 2002. It's flagship product: SpamWeed Anti-Spam Filter, uses a combination of URL rules, Bayesian statistics and other- state-of-the-art spam blocking techniques to identify spam and quarantine email viruses. The product can block over 90% spam out-of-the-box and with its learning engine in place, it can achieve close to 100% filtering accuracy after about one-week's training. The product is also feature-rich and easy-to-use. For more information, please visit: www.spamweed.com.
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