iHateSpam

Spam mail is the bane of the entire IT industry today. There wouldn’t be a single soul with an e-mail id, who never receives at least a couple of spam mail everyday. Owing to the growing amount of spam, several software products and solutions are becoming available to combat the menace. Many desktop versions are downloadable by the dozen from lots of websites. We picked one such utility called iHateSpam from Sunbelt software to see how effective can it get. It’s available as a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.

iHateSpam takes over the message rules from your mail client, which in our case was Outlook Express. It installs itself as an add-on and takes over the message rules, and also puts in its own set of rules to block mail from the most common spam sites. As a one-time effort, it also asks you to categorize all mail ids in your address book as friends or enemies. All incoming
mail from friends is then kept in your inbox, while the remaining goes into the deleted items folder. It also gives you the option to delete messages directly off the server so that you don’t have to manually empty your deleted items folder every time. It also creates a toolbar of its own in the mail client having buttons to directly tag e-mail as spam, not spam, or add a mail sender as friend or enemy. This makes it easy for you to quickly filter the incoming mail, which the utility hasn’t been able to. These buttons actually help the utility learn what type of mail you usually get, and gradually starts deleting all unwanted mail.

Further, the utility has a rule threshold comprising five different settings. These identify how hard the utility should work to block spam. The amount of filtering starts from “block some spam” at the bottom rung and ends with “block all spam” as the top rung. Before it starts monitoring your messages, you have to define this rule threshold. You can always change it later depending upon how much spam it’s blocking.

So the biggest question is whether the utility can completely filter out all incoming spam mail. To test this, we tried the utility for about fifteen days at three different thresholds–block some spam, block all spam, and block most spam. Out of all these, block all spam of course was the most effective. Interestingly however, in addition to the spam mail, it also blocked off some newsletters in this mode. The remaining options, as their names suggest, managed to block some amount of spam. The utility also has an option to block/allow mails by keyword, which can be used to allow the newsletters you want.

The Bottom Line: Overall, the utility is useful in filtering all your incoming mail. It saves you the time of sifting through your mail manually, identifying and deleting all spam mail. On the other hand, you may ultimately have to go through all spam mail it identified and put in the deleted items folder to ensure there’s no important mail that it tagged as spam. A 30 day trial version of the software can be downloaded from Sunbelt software’s website.

Anil Chopra at PCQ Labs