SpamPal

I've been using Spampal at work for several years. Just started using it at home as well as my ISP's spamblocking is getting overloaded apparently. I have had no real problems with Spampal and lots of good protection. I second the wish list items in the first review.

One thing that I have done is specifically tag everything as spam that I have not whitelisted - I add my address book to the whitelist and then any lists etc that I want to get. I rarely get unsolicited email that I care about so this works well for me.

Having used SpamPal since its beginning and finding that the spam filtering is close to 100% on my system I am constantly imressed with the outstanding support given by all the adminstrators of the forum. I have listed SpamPal on my web site with a 5 star rating. one of the best things on will find for fighting spam.

After two weeking of testing, here are the stats:

Spam Pal intercepted 553 spam-mails.

It missed 4 spam messages that were then added to the blacklist.

It misclassified 4 messages as spam that were not (false positives); however, 3 of them were from distribution lists that could be understandably mistaken for spam. The only puzzling one was Mike Simmons For reasons I'm not sure I understand, Mike is on a DNSBL somewhere (you bad boy). No false positives showed up after the first 48 hours.

Perhaps the most amazing statistical finding was the enormous rate of growth in SPAM. Compared to a comparable two week period in June (from hand-scanned spam), the number of Spam messages increased from 281 to 553, a nearly 100% increase, month over month.


Reliability

The software has caused no problems elsewhere on my system and has no apparent memory leaks. (Stayed running for two consecutive weeks, one week with nearly continuous use of other apps, one week idle (but active) while I was in Uxbridge and Birmingham.)


Functionality
At first, I thought SpamPal might be a good, freeware compromise to commerically available products. The further I investigate, the less convinced of this I become. Enumerated conclusions

A. SpamPal is a very, very nice piece of freeware. Does exactly what it says it will. No adware, spyware, nagware. It's written by someone who appears to have a passion for thwarting spam and the talent to do something about it. People like this make the internet a better place.

B. Most of the features that were originally on my "nice to have list" are actually built into the package. A good example is blocking an entire country. SpamPal lists the most abused country domains (China, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, and Turkey. Of these, I would only tend to get legit mail from Brazil and Turkey, so I can block out the others trapping the vast majority of 419 scheme messages and some of the sleazier porn ads.) Some time needs to be taken working through the option screens to make sure you understand everything Spam Pal can do. Chances are, it's in there.

C. SpamPal has a growing set of Plug-Ins that allow for some nice spam fighting features. I limited my 1st two weeks testing to the core package, but am now in the process of testing several of these, including:

1. Logfile - a plug-in that gives me an ongoing log of what was "touched" by SpamPal's filters and why
2. Notify, which allows me to hear a different sound when I get new "real" mail, vs spam only (most of my activity)
3. URL-Body -- if this works well, this could be a true gem that I'd like to see added to the core package. It allows me to filter by URL's (web links) contained in a message body. This means no matter how many bogus email addresses they use to sell me that breast enlargement cream, the messages are going straight to the SpamTrap.
4. Bayesian -- Sort of the "state of the thought" in Spam aversion. Where other mechanisms rely on static blocking of reported spammers and spam sympathizers, the Bayesian approach is statistical and heuristic.


D. There are some additions that would be nice:

1. a right-click context menu addition to add a message to the blacklist or whitelist, for example. (Since SpamPal works with a wide variety of mail clients(in-between the mailserver and the email client), it's easy to understand why it doesn't have this feature.) It is an annoyance, however, have to open a piece of spam to copy the email address to the clipboard so it can be added to the blacklist. This would probanly have to

2. Likewise, a tool to apply the SpamPal settings to my existing email folders would be wonderful. (Again since SpamPal works with a wide variety of mail clients, it's easy to understand why it doesn't have this feature.)

3. The ability to populate a proforma whitelist from my address/contact book and from anyone with an address entery in my sent file folder (on the theory that if I've send someone a message, I may care to hear a response.)

4. A nice to have compliment would be a country/TLD whitelist. This would allow me to shut out the whole world and permit traffic only from the TLD's I choose. A litte xenophobic, I suppose, but spam made me this way.

Perhaps the advance most needed in Spam Pal is the recruitment of mailreader specific partners that could implement a tighter interface between specific mailreaders (like Outlook Express) and the Spam Pal engine.

Conclusion

In all, this is probably the most gratifying piece of freeware I've discovered since IrfanView about 5 years back. I've traded my constant state of irriation at newly arrived SPAM for a perverse glee in watching my SPAM Trap grow. This has given me new energy to pursue political solutions to spam, including my enormously popular movement to make SPAM a capital offense.