- Product: Ella
- Direct Price: $29.95 (15-day free trial
available)
- Requires: 35MB of hard drive space; Microsoft
Outlook 2000 or Outlook XP running a POP3 or
Microsoft Exchange e-mail account; Microsoft
Windows 98, Me, 2000, or XP
- Company Info: Open Field Software.,
831-466-6900, www.openfieldsoftware.com
Editor Rating: 
Welcome to the era of the antispam tool. With the average
e-mail user receiving 2,200 unsolicited and unwanted
messages a year, according to Jupiter Research, the market
for software designed to block the flood of junk is getting
bigger by the month. The latest entry is Ella, a $29.95
download that not only filters spam from your in-box but
also helps organize correspondence.
Attempting to set its app apart from the other products
on the market, Open Field Software bills Ella not as a spam
blocker but as a smart in-box assistant. The software
doesn't just separate spam from legitimate mail; it sorts
your messages into three folders of your choosing, one of
which you can designate for spam. Once you have defined, for
example, one folder for spam, one for newsletters, and one
for personal correspondence, you give the program examples
of the sorts of messages that should go to each.
Ella's best use is as a spam filter, of course. Junk
e-mail is the first thing most of us want filtered from our
in-boxes. However you use the utility, you should be pleased
with the results. It's not perfect—no e-mail filtering
tool is—but even after the initial set-up, a majority of
messages go to the right place. And as you continue
training, Ella becomes increasingly accurate. Moreover, the
software is wonderfully easy to use, integrating seamlessly
with Microsoft Outlook 2000 or Outlook XP.
After installation, Ella launches a training wizard the
first time you open Outlook. The wizard asks you to name the
three folders you wish to sort mail into. One of the three
is your Outlook in-box (Ella created the other two during
installation). The default names are Inbox, Later, and Spam.
Later is for unsolicited e-mail that is somewhere
between legitimate correspondence and spam and needn't be
dealt with until you've gone through your in-box. The wizard
then asks you to scan Outlook and identify examples of
messages that you would like sorted into each of the three
folders. This takes no more than a few minutes. Initially,
you have to give only 10 to 15 examples for each category.
Ella examines more than 100 attributes of each
example—items like the sender's address, the subject line,
the message ID, and various aspects of the body
text—identifying common characteristics. The program then
sorts your incoming mail guided by these characteristics.
Even after a few minutes of training, Ella is reasonably
accurate. We trained it to leave personal mail in our
in-box, move computer-company PR newsletters and mass
mailings into a second folder, and shuttle spam to a third.
We filtered 1,000 messages—546 we considered personal
correspondence, 137 we classified as PR, and 317 we
considered spam.
The app correctly filtered 86 percent of the personal
correspondence, 40 percent of the newsletters and PR
mailings, and 96 percent of the spam. That's quite
impressive considering we gave the utility only 30 messages
for training. As you might expect, the initial
false-positive rate is high. Thirteen percent of personal
correspondence wound up in the spam folder and 1 percent in
the newsletters folder. To improve the results, you can
provide additional training using the three buttons Ella
adds to the Outlook toolbar. The buttons correspond to your
three mail categories. If a message ends up in the wrong
folder, you select the item and click on the button
indicating the correct folder. Ella, which moves the item to
the right folder, alters its filtering rules accordingly.
After we trained the software with another 200 messages, the
false-positive rate dropped to less than 2 percent.
Ella uses your examples and continues to learn—it's as
simple as that. You can rerun the training wizard to
reorganize your folders and retrain the filters, but the
software offers no other dialog boxes, buttons, or windows.
We would like to see a whitelist so messages from certain
senders always make the in-box, and we would appreciate a
blacklist for the opposite purpose, but Open Field says it
wants to keep the app as easy to use as possible. Ella
certainly achieves that goal.
