Thread: Spamihilator Anti-Spam

Spamihilator works collaboratively with most POP3 email clients. It is not a plug-in for the email client but it always resides in memory and can be activated by right-clicking on its little icon in the system tray. Our grouse is that one might tend to forget about it after a while and then worry when messages end up in its Recycle Bin and not show up in the Inbox folder.

During installation it detects your email client and all email accounts and configures these to enable filtering. All incoming mails are scanned and any messages identified as spam are moved into Spamihilator's own Recycle Bin. If it has incorrectly identified a particular mail as spam, there's a way to mark it as genuine email, so the next time a mail from this same source is received it will go to the Inbox folder. The program also remembers emails that it recently delivered to your Inbox. If it has delivered an email that it should have identified as spam you can still mark it as spam and tell its Bayesian filter to adjust its parameters accordingly.

Features
The spam recognition rate in such applications really depends on the type of filters and filtering algorithms it adopts. Spamihilator has multiple filters and it also maintains lists for blocked senders and friends. Its Word Filter recognizes typical spam words that marketers use. In addition, there's a Learning Filter that maintains a list of good words used in legitimate mails. The filters scan every email for known words following the rules of the Bayesian method. The result of the scan can indicate a mail as spam, non-spam or neither. If it's 'neither' or 'suspected' then the Word Filter will process it.



Of course, you'll need to 'train' the filters to recognize spam and non-spam words. You can make the filters more effective by visiting Spamihilator's Recycle Bin regularly and restoring legitimate mails to the Inbox folder. In the Training Area you'll see a couple of messages that are regarded as 'suspected spam'. Either right-click on a message and select one of the options from the context menu or just click the 'Spam' or 'Non-Spam' buttons on the toolbar to train the program to correctly recognize the mail you receive.

Non-spam messages will be restored to the Inbox folder. After marking mails as spam or non-spam, be sure to click the 'Learn' button to register words in the filter's lists. For instance, one filter can block messages containing file attachments like executable files.

Performance
The developer claims that a few days of training can bump up the spam recognition rate to 98 percent. After training the filters everyday for a week we found that. the number of spam messages in our Inbox decreased significantly. We found Spamihilator filters to be more effective than the 'Rules' features of MS Outlook. Spamihilator scanned all incoming emails yet it did not hinder the performance of our email client, in the way that other plug-in programs such as Xobni, did earlier. So it tops in performance.

Once you install Spamihilator, we recommend a regular visit to its Recycle B. Otherwise you might miss an important mail that Spamihilator may have removed from your Inbox and placed in the Recycle bin, mistaking it for spam. You can restore legitimate messages from the Spamihilator Recycle bin.