SpamAware

Download: Author’s Site

Spam-Aware is one of the leading freeware anti-spam programs available today. If you are constantly bombarded by spam in your mailbox its time to get some protection above and beyond the standard stuff provided by your mail client and ISP, a third layer of protection is often the key to eliminating the maximum amount of spam.

Overview

Firstly don’t confuse SpamAware with Spam-Aware, the hyphenated version is shareware and will cost you a pretty penny. SpamAware is 4.41MB in size and quick to install once downloaded.

SpamAware is a mail client plugin and built exclusively for MS-Outlook and Outlook Express, making it perfect for a large proportion of Windows users. SpamAware is built on SpamAssassin and uses it to rate your new mail and what action to take. The action the program takes is based partly on user settings – so control is by no means out of your hands. The program notably supports Black- and Whitelist filtering and Bayes.

Functionality

The program is very easy to use and integrates very well with Outlook – the setup is very quick and we had it working in a few minutes. We noticed a marked reduction in Spam but not a total halt. This is certainly a four star program and falls just short of brilliance.

Downside

We did find the program to be a little slow – this is probably because it checks public blacklists. If you have a very slow internet you may find this to be a big factor.