iHateSpam By Cade Metz February 17, 2004

• Product: iHateSpam
• Direct Price: $19.95 direct
• Company Info: Sunbelt Software USA, www.sunbelt-software.com

Editor Rating:

Sunbelt Software, maker of iHateSpam, still hasn't solved the app's false-positive problem. When we reviewed iHateSpam last spring , it had one of the worst false-positive rates. This time the program didn't fare any better: Nearly 20 percent of our legitimate mail was classified as spam.

To be fair, the app also blocked an impressive amount of spam. Of the more than 400 spam messages we fed it, 91 percent were correctly identified. You can easily set up traditional whitelists and blacklists, customize filters to block messages containing certain words or phrases, and even make filters to allow messages containing certain words or phrases.

Sunbelt offers two separate versions of the app: one for Outlook Express, and one for Outlook, which can handle IMAP and Exchange accounts. Each version is fairly easy to use. Another notable feature is iHateSpam's Hotmail integration, which is among the best we've seen in that you can use the program from within Hotmail's Web interface. All of the other products in this roundup except SpamKiller only do this in Outlook or Outlook Express. We particularly like that, upon installation, a wizard lets you preset the aggressiveness of the filters. Five different settings are available; we tested using the default middle setting. Judging from the app's high false-positive rate, you'll probably want to start at one of the two lower settings.