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Article Title: Spamihilator - Clean Up Your Inbox The Freeware Way

Article Author: Daryl Quenet
Article Category: Software Articles
Times Read: 2652
Date: 2005-02-07 20:00:00
Pages: 1

Are you one of those people who constantly receives 30+ spam emails per day? I personally use OutLook Express (OLE) as a mail client, and average around 40 spam emails per day. Now there are several ways to design an effective Spam buster, and Spamihilator has hit the nail dead on. It works with any POP3/IMAP/SSL/TLS mail client and effectively cleans out spam with plugins and training.

This is the second antispam tool I've tried out, in the past I've ran Norton AntiSpam. I found Norton to be bloated, simple, and a fustrating at times (atleast with OLE). The biggest fustration with Norton Antispam was it's integration into the email system. To get around this Spamihilator setups up a local email server and downloads your email from your main email server. Once it's downloaded an email onto it's local server it runs several rules over the emails to determines if it's a valid or spam email. The rules are determined by the plugins you install (there quite the database of plugins to choose from on the Spamihilator website). I installed the following Plugins:

0190-Filter

Alphabet Soup

DNS - Blacklist

Mystic Signs Filter

RFC Validator

S P A C E Filter

URL Filter

XHeader Filter

But the plugin system doesn't just stop with installing the plugins, the majority of them give you a good list of configuration options within Spamihilators Settings window. Now I'm sure a few reads are skeptic that being a free program it can be as effective as something like antispam, but in truth it can even more effective. The DNS Blacklist plugin allows you to use public databases containing IPs for mail servers that are known to be public relays and spamming email servers (a public relay is a mail server that allows all users to send email through them). For this service the plugin can interact with any blacklist server you desire. I personally use the lists hosted by spamhaus.org. These servers are xbl.spamhaus.org and sbl.spamhaus.org. More Reading.

The training area allows you to teach your email server how better to defend your inbox. To achieve this it keeps a copy of every email that isn't in your friends list or blocked sender list and places them into training area. You can then go through this list selecting emails (remember hold CTRL or SHIFT to add additional items at once), and then choose if there your friends, or you wish to add to the blocked sender list. Although spammer rarely use the same email twice (you'll notice most now are randomly generated at time of emailing ie vmrfbamqnytjg@buffaloblizzard.com), this will help block the few that do. The Learning Center also tells you which filters have been tripped to flag this email, and those that passed all plugins are called Learning. Also if you find a user in the Learning Center that your discover is your friend, if you add him to your list it will move all emails from the Learning Center, and Recycle bin back to ready to be downloaded.

The new Learning Filter (Bayesian Filter) uses the rules of Thomas Bayes (English mathematician, 18th century) and calculates a certain Spam-Probability for every E-Mail. You can train this filter! So it will know your messages even better than you. Hence the recognition rate will continuously increase.

In addition Spamihilator uses a Word-Filter, that searches messages for known keywords. So if you notice spam thats still showing up in your inbox, you can select key words that your sure won't show up in your inbox (other then from users on your Friends list) and ad them in the Settings screen.

Spamihilator boasts it removes more than 98% of spam mails. Although it may not seem like that at first, provided you install all the plugins above, and you give it a few weeks of training you'll be amazed! Not only that but it does it all with only a 4.5 meg memory footprint. Theres also a plugin that can notify you when mail is waiting on the mail server. And finally not that I haven't been won over already, you can easily shutdown and restart, or disable the spam filter from the System Tray. But don't just take my word on how useful Spamihilator is, an image is worth a 1000 words :)