• Product: Goodbye Spam
• Company Info: NextGen Development Corp., 949-481-1190, www.goodbyespam.com

Like ChoiceMail, NexGen's Goodbye Spam fights junk mail without complex analytics, using only a whitelist and a blacklist to filter your e-mail in-box, and it helps you build these lists by mailing challenge messages to unknown senders. As Qurb demonstrates, this approach can work well. But because of a flawed interface, Goodbye Spam is often more trouble than it's worth.

Goodbye Spam runs as a Web-based service; to use it, you have to pay a monthly fee. The Home version ($3.32 per month) filters one e-mail account; the Professional version ($5.32 per month) filters an unlimited number of accounts. But despite its name, Goodbye Spam Professional isn't suited for corporate use. Since the product is Web-based, it can't read Microsoft Exchange mail or access POP3 or IMAP accounts sitting behind a firewall unless particular network ports are left open—something most IT departments are reluctant to do. But the application works with several types of home accounts. In addition to supporting POP3 and IMAP, it handles accounts on AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo!

Once you sign up for Goodbye Spam, you can build a whitelist using your existing address book. In some cases, it reads address books automatically. In others, you have to export your address book as a text file first. This initial whitelist is a good starting point, but nowhere as comprehensive as the one that Qurb builds during installation. To set up a reliable whitelist at installation, you have to build a good part of it manually, address by address. You also have the option of setting up a blacklist (also all built manually).

With these two lists, Goodbye Spam sets about filtering your mail. New messages from anyone on your whitelist are sent on to your e-mail client. All other messages are sidetracked to Goodbye Spam's servers and are accessible only through your Web-based account. Those sent from an address on your blacklist are placed in Goodbye Spam's Trash folder, where they remain for 24 hours. Messages received from addresses neither on your whitelist nor blacklist are put into a quarantine folder.

When an e-mail is quarantined, the sender is automatically sent a challenge message. Senders who respond are put on your whitelist, and their messages are sent on to your e-mail client. In theory, this automatically lifts legitimate mail (meaning from a live person) from quarantine, even if it's from an unknown sender.

But in practice, many people wind up not responding to challenge messages (they may find it off-putting, or their own spam client may filter out the server-generated challenge message as spam). Also, you'll never get responses from server-generated addresses that send you newsletters and other broadcast messages; you'll need to remember to add these to your approved list.

Hence we found ourselves spending a great deal of time pulling messages from quarantine by hand. Messages left in quarantine for seven days are automatically moved to the Trash folder.

And pulling messages from quarantine isn't as easy as it is with an app like Qurb. You can't access the quarantine without visiting the Goodbye Spam Web site, so in essence, Goodbye Spam becomes your second e-mail account. You have to toggle back and forth between it and your main e-mail client, checking messages on both. You could use Goodbye Spam as your sole e-mail interface, but it lacks many advanced tools you get with typical e-mail clients.