Thread: Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft Outlook

CLOUDMARK PIONEERED THE Concept of community-based spam fil¬tering, and its community is now over a million strong. Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft Outlook keeps most spam out of your Out¬look inbox while marking virtualJy no valid mail
as spam-and that's what I look for in a spam filter. Separate versions of the program support Outlook Express and Thunderbird, and a version for Vista's Windows Mail is in the works.

Where many antispam products filter only standard POP3 e-mail, Cloudmark Desktop strips out spam from any e-mail account that your e-mail client supports. That includes POP3 and IMAP accounts, webmail accounts accessed via POP3, and (for Outlook only) Exchange-based mail accounts. About the only kind of e-mail it can't filter is a Web-based account that doesn't offer POP3 access.



Just to see what would happen I selected all the spam messages that got into the inbox and actively marked them as spam. I was hoping to see my trust rating rise, but alas, there was no visible change. Apparently one must make steady and consistent contributions to the community before the trust rating rises.

One thing is clear: Community-based filtering is seriously effective, and it doesn't suffer the false positives that plague some other solu¬tions. Even though some spam is guaranteed to get through, the percentage overall is far below that of most other products. For the moment, however, Cloud mark supports a wider variety of e-mail clients, and therefore earns our antispam Editors' Choice.