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  • Spam Bully 3 Review

    Spam is an annoyance. While it may not deserve a 9 year prison sentences like in the case of Jeremy Jaynes, it certainly does need to be stopped somehow. The best way to stop receiving spam, or to reduce the amount of spam that arrives in your inbox is to proactively fight it by installing programs such as SpamBully, Cactus Spam Filter, ChoiceMail, or other spam prevention programs. Today I sat down with SpamBully 3 for several hours, to learn the ins and outs of the program, and to see how the program stacks up against the competition. The SpamBully demo has a 14 day trial in order to evaluate the program. If you decide to purchase the program, it costs $29.95.

    SpamBully 3 is a program designed for Outlook and Outlook Express users. Since Outlook has only a basic junk mail filtering system, SpamBully attempts to fill in the missing feature base by including an advanced spam filtering system that adapts to your individual usage. The system is robust, but not error proof, incorrectly filtering a real message as spam on a rare occasion, especially when you first use the product. As time goes on the system grows more accustomed to the types of messages you would like to receive and those that are pure garbage. Like any adaptive technology, the higher the volume of mail that you receive, the more data SpamBully will have in order to correctly filter your mail.

    SpamBully installation is pretty standard, and requires you to reboot after the installation. I decided to see if it actually needed it (I have seen some programs work just fine without rebooting that claim that rebooting is necessary.) It seems that it works just fine for Outlook Express and Outlook 2003, neither of which actually required a reboot in order to use the program. After the installation I was presented with an error message saying that installation did not complete, however it seemed to have actually installed just fine and presented no further problems for me.

    SpamBully 3 has a training mode that starts up the first time you load Outlook Express, which examines your previous emails that you have kept in your inbox and replied to, and to those that you have labeled spam. This is indicative of the whole strategy of SpamBully; it tries to deduct the types of messages that you actually want to receive by using “artificial intelligence.” This is a hyped up term for the algorithm that SpamBully uses, which attempts to analyze the content, title, and sender of the email in order to store a fingerprint of the types of emails that you wish to receive. It installs a toolbar in Outlook and Outlook Express that allows you to manually flag messages as spam or as “not spam.” The toolbar does not look quite as polished as other packages I’ve seen, but it works well, and has many configurable options available.

    So how effective is SpamBully 3 at actually catching spam? To investigate this, I signed up for several different spam marketing lists, and sent some spam to myself as well. To offer comparisons, I also signed up for the spam for my Hotmail account, which has always been decent at filtering out spam. It did not take long for me to receive my first spam email, which SpamBully did not correctly identify. However, after marking it as spam, the next 20 or so spam emails were filtered correctly. To insure that regular messages were received, I then sent a few emails from other accounts that I have, all of which made it to my inbox. My hotmail account did not do quite as good, only catching about half of the spam messages. Overall, SpamBully seems to have done its job.

    In conclusion, I would recommend SpamBully 3 for small and medium sized businesses, or for the occasional home user that has a POP3 account. The program is definitely user friendly, and their algorithm works very well, provided you receive at least a decent amount of email for the program to analyze. Home users might want to pass on this program for a freeware alternative, such as Cactus Spam Filter, which works almost equally well, while having a much more attractive price tag (free.) However, for the price and feature set, SpamBully does a great job and integrates perfectly with both Outlook, and Outlook Express.

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