Cloudmark Desktop Beats Spam
Back in 2003 I started to use an Outlook plug-in called SpamBayes to filter spam. For over two years this plug-in worked beautifully behind the scenes filtering most spam with next to no false positives. But recently, its performance has become less impressive.
SpamBayes uses a learning algorithm to, over time, figure out what words spammers use. This method worked initially because spammers weren't particularly creative with their efforts. The problem now is that spammers have come up with some clever ideas to deal with such filtering software.
And that's where Cloudmark Desktop comes in. I had actually used this program years ago. Back then it was really good, but when Cloudmark started to charge a monthly fee, I uninstalled the program and stuck with Spambayes which was free. Cloudmark's solution still isn't free, but I think it now provides enough value to make it worth the $39.95.
Cloudmark's solution uses the "power of the people". Everyone that installs the program becomes part of spam-fighting network. When I tag something in my inbox as spam, I am in effect tagging it as spam for everyone else. The more accurate my tagging is, the more I'm trusted by the network. And of course, the more people in the network, the better the system will be. Even if spammers try new techniques, they e-mails will likely still fail to get through because the network is made up of actual people who have incredible skills at recognizing what e-mail qualifies as spam.
I'm in the midst of trying the 15-day evaluation. So far, 291 e-mails have been checked, 200 have been correctly marked as spam, and I've had to manually mark 4 as spam. That gives Cloudmark a score of about 98%. Unfortunately, for those of you that don't use Outlook or Outlook Express, you're out of luck.
Kruzer,
Whitelists are great, but they're too limited to work for everyone. If you run a business, you want to be able to receive e-mails from people you don't know. If you're active with blogs and forums, you want automatic notification e-mails to get through. And if you buy a lot of online goods, you want confirmation e-mails to make it to your inbox. Attempting to whitelist all of these would be incredibly time consuming and prone to error.
Ya know, it's really stupid and a waste of time to use any spam filtering.
Why can't Yahoo, Google and others offer WHITE LIST option?
Once I select who's e-mail I want to receive all the rest is DEFAULTED to trash.
However, all e-mail can appear on another list who entered a random generated code to write to me. SPAM senders can't answer, so it falls in the trash. Anyone (live person) who bothers to enter the code by hand, can be presented seperately.
It's up to the owner of the mailbox to either trash it or add it to the "receive" list, or White list.
Nothing can be simpler and SPAM would die tomorrow if everyone has a white list. Who don't, well, let them get the SPAM.
So, what's the big deal for Yahoo, Google not giving this simple option?
Money....
They profit one way or another by indirect SPAM and selling useless filters.
If am not mistaken, Earthlink already has white-list.
I use spamihilator. It's easy, flexible and looks nice.
Handles well my tons of junk mail. (And has allow/deny lists and plugins which I really missed in spamBayes)