SpamAid: Spam Filter For Outlook
I use Gmail as my main email client and the spam filters are pretty good. However, I need to use Outlook to synchronise my contacts and my mail with my PDA. I’ve never found Microsoft’s inbuilt spam filters to be any good, so luckily I’ve just been asked to review SpamAid by ReviewMe as a sponsored review.
SpamAid 4.0 uses Bayesian filtering technology that claims to identify about 98% of incoming spam messages. Any spam caught is placed in a spam folder. I’m a big fan of services that do this as no service is 100% effective, and it’s good to have a way to recover mistakes.
The service normally costs $29 (there’s a 30 day free trial), but luckily I was given a key to try out the service for free. Installation was simple and went without a hitch even though I’m using Outlook 2007 which wasn’t listed on the site. Once SpamAid was installed it automatically add my Inbox and Sent Items folders as the folders to be scanned.
One very nice feature SpamAid has is that it can scan emails you’ve already received, which can be handy if you didn’t have any protection previously. I had 2,065 emails in my inbox so this provided a good opportunity to test the filter. SpamAid found 60 spam messages, however 14 of these were genuine messages. This is where the Bayesian filtering comes into play because as part of the installation a toolbar is added to Outlook that allows one-click correction of mistakes. SpamAid learns from it’s mistakes so the next time I get an email from those contacts or with similar content, it won’t tag them as spam.
Overall I quite like the service and it’s way better than the Zone Alarm filters I used to use. The only quibble I have is with the price, although you don’t have to buy updates so the $29 spent should be a one-off charge. If you’re looking for a good spam solution for Outlook that actually works and learns from it’s mistakes then you should definitely consider SpamAid.
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