Thread: iHate Spam 5.0

Sunbelt Software is well known for its enterprise-level e-mail security products, but the company also supports the indi¬vidual consumer with its iHateSpam line. If you're fa-miliar with the line, the latest version, iHateSpam 5.0, will come as a bit of a surprise: It's a completely new prod¬uct. At present it's available only for Outlook, but versions for Out-look Express, Thunderbird, and Vista's Windows Mail are due next quarter.

Sunbelt had originally licensed its consumer-side antis pam technology from Giant Soft-ware. When Microsoft bought Giant in 2004, Sunbelt had to take development in-house. Starting with Version 5, though, Sunbelt is licens-ing spam-filtering technology from Cloudmark . Except for minor differences in the user interface and registration process, iHateSpam is virtu¬ally identical to Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft
Outlook.



They Use Your Head What is community-based antispam? Instead of trying to analyze each message and deter-mine whether or not it's
valid, the product relies on a community of over a million users to make that determination-in this case, Cloudmark Desktop's. If you see a spam

message in the inbox and click the Is Spam button, a hashed "fingerprint" of that message wings its way to a central database. When enough users have marked the exact same mes¬sage as spam, iHateSpam blocks that message for all other users.
That's the simple version, but in fact the process is more subtle than a simple show of hands. Each time you identify a message as spam, your response is com¬pared with that of other members of the community. If your rating agrees with theirs, your trust level gets cranked up just a bit. If it disagrees, your trust level goes down. The higher your trust level, the more your vote counts. It's a system that requires a large community to be effec-tive, and fortunately, the Cloud¬mark community is immense.