Adware Report: Spam Eater Pro Review

Product: SpamEater Pro
Vendor: High Mountain Software
Price: $24.95
Editor Rating: 1 stars

Pros

+ None!

Cons

- Mediocre protection against spam
- Standalone program - does not integrate with your email account
- Extremely slow took hours to filter even a small number of emails.
- User interface very poor

Review

We test each spam filter by first sending 100 spam emails to a test account with the spam filter installed. If necessary, we then train the product, typically by pressing a button marking the email as spam. After the training process is complete, we then send a different set of spam emails to the same account to determine the overall effectiveness of the product.

If applicable, we tested each spam filter on Outlook Express, Eudora, and Yahoo.

Installation

SpamEater Pro installed perfectly out of the box.

Usability

Spam Eater does not integrate into your email program. Instead, to use it you open a separate program which occasionally queries your email provider and removes spam messages from your account. We found that having to run two programs (our email program and Spam Eater Pro) was cumbersome. It is also a problem if you access the same email account from two different locations, because the email that is removed can only be accessed from one location. Should Spam Eater Pro block legitimate emails, they will not be accessible from other mailboxes.

We were decidedly negative about the user interface. The status window could not be minimized or hidden, nor was there any way to cancel an update short of using ctrl-alt-delete. The primary results window did not appear in the task bar. And in the main window, each email is flagged with a cryptic icon E or F (we still arent sure what this means). Clicking on the column headers allows you to sort that column, as is typical in most windows applications, but the column headers were also combined with dropdown boxes. Not only is this confusing, the dropdown isnt wide enough to read the contents. It was little things such as this that made the program feel cumbersome and difficult to use.

Training

Spam Eater did not support any type of automated training ability. Instead, you are forced to manually enter a new rule for every different type of spam email. Because of this, we couldnt see ourselves using this product on a long-term basis.

We then attempted to login to our test email account using the product. After downloading seven emails the program hung. We stopped and started the program several times, but we were never able to complete the testing process. Finally, we started it again and allowed it to run overnight. When we returned in the morning, the program had successfully cycled through our emails.

Of the 96 spam and 4 legitimate emails, Spam Eater Pro blocked 57 and allowed the 4 legitimate emails (57% accuracy).

No training options are available, so we then proceeded to filter an additional 291 spam and 15 legitimate emails, again allowing the program to run overnight. Spam Eater Pro blocked 154 (53%) of the spam (but did allow the legitimate email through). These were among the poorest results of any of the products we tested.

Other Features

Spam Eater Pro was lacking in functionality. The only type of rule it supported was checking for literal strings of characters spammers have long since figured out how to beat this type of filtering technology.

Another important piece of functionality that Spam Eater Pro is missing is the ability to share spam rules with other users. This dramatically increases the accuracy of spam filtering, and without it, the accuracy of the filter drops.

Summary

Spam Eater Pro provided poor protection against spam, scored poorly for usability, and was among the slowest of the products we tested. For a few dollars more, you are better off with one of our top picks.

Price: $24.95
Free Trial: YES

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