Spam Bully Review

Product: Spam Bully Price: $29.99 Company Info: Axaware, LLC Editor Rating: 4 stars Free Trial Link - Try It Now

Pros
+ Provides excellent spam filtering capabilities
+ Quick learning
+ Minimal impact on email download time

Cons
- Aggressive spam filtering; need to watch your spam folder, especially in the first few days.

Review

We test each spam filter by first sending 100 spam emails to a test account with the spam filter installed. If necessary, we then train the product, typically by pressing a button marking the email as spam. After the training process is complete, we then send a different set of spam emails to the same account to determine the overall effectiveness of the product.

Installation

Installation was quick and straightforward. Spam Bully integrated into Microsoft Outlook the first time without a reboot.

Usability

Spam Bully is an intuitive program to use. When you first install it, it will scan your email folders to look for likely good and bad email addresses (for instance, any email address in your 'sent' folder is likely a good address). This can take a few minutes if you have a lot of saved email.

Spam Bully installs an integrated toolbar into Microsoft Outlook

When it's finished, you simply use your email client as usual. Spam Bully will automatically begin filtering junk email the first time you use it. While it does a very good job, you will probably need to train it a bit before it learns your environment perfectly. There are several ways to do this. First, if a spam email makes it through, just select it and hit the 'spam' button on the toolbar. Conversely, if you happen to be checking your spam folder and find a good email in there, then select it and click the 'not spam' button. It will be moved back to your inbox and Spam Bully will act accordingly in the future.

Training

Of the 96 spam and 4 legitimate emails, Spam Bully blocked 96 and allowed all 4 of the good emails (100% accuracy). This was an impressive result and probably based in large part to the intensive training that the program takes when it's installed.

No training options are available, so we then proceeded to filter an additional 291 spam and 15 legitimate emails, again allowing the program to run overnight. Spam Bully blocked 293 of them (99% accuracy), so it accidentally blocked two good emails. We found them in the spam box and retrained as above. We then used the program over the next 15 days. We found that it did tend to be a bit aggressive in the beginning, but near the end of the first week, it was performing its job perfectly.

We found it interesting that the anti-spam programs of today tend to run much more aggressively or passively than they used to. This is likely because of the sophisticated defensive techniques that the spammers are using to disguise their junk emails these days. For instance, spammers now have programs that will send out thousands of permutations of the same email in an effort to defeat community blocking programs (such as Cloudmark). It's for this reason that Spam Bully's lack of a community feature winds up being a strength. We confirmed this when we checked out spam folder, and found that we would often receive a dozen or more variations of the same junk email ... all of which were blocked.

Other Features

Spam Bully has some neat reporting functions if you ever get curious about how much spam was blocked. For instance, it blocked over 5500 junk emails for us in the 15 days we were using it. If you assume it takes 1 second to scan and delete an email, that's over 90 minutes in time savings over the past two weeks! Also, we learned that most of the spam email we receive comes from Russia, China, Africa, and South America ... no big surprises there.

Spam Bully blocked over 5500 emails in two weeks during out test

Spam Bully also allows you to fight back by bouncing emails to spammers. We personally don't do this because we would be sending emails all day, but you may choose to. You can also send a challenge message back to unknown senders, requiring them to click a link before accepting email from them.

Spam Bully also shows you where the spam is coming from.

Summary

Spam Bully is an inexpensive bullet-proof anti-spam solution which provides more features than any other product on the market.

Price: $29.99
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