Junk Spy 2.02 By Larry J. Seltzer February 25, 2003

• Product: Junk Spy 2.02
• Direct Price: $59 direct (includes one year of updates)
• Company Info: Sundial Systems Corp., www.junkspy.com

Editor Rating:

Junk Spy won Editors' Choice in our previous antispam tools roundup . Although the market has since matured, Junk Spy, which provides fair spam protection, remains technically interesting and viable for power users who don't use Outlook. Junk Spy is a standalone app that analyzes mail before your mail client retrieves it. The program even runs on IBM's OS/2 Warp, but it guards only POP3 mailboxes.

Junk Spy uses an old-fashioned method of intercepting mail: It runs as a local POP3 server. The user encodes the true mail server name into the user name in the mail program settings. But this can cause conflicts with programs, such as some antivirus tools, that use the same technique, and workarounds are complicated.

When Junk Spy identifies spam through pattern recognition, it adds special headers to the messages and relies on users creating rules in their mail clients to filter the spam based on the presence of those headers. With most mail clients it can also delete the messages.

Alas, we ran into a major problem in testing. One test message contained a 2.15MB attachment; parsing this message caused Junk Spy to fail. We deleted that message to complete our performance testing. We could also have invoked Junk Spy's ability to skip the parsing of large attachments. A warning message would have been appreciated.

Some clever features separate Junk Spy from the field. First, Sundial delivers updates to the product via e-mail messages that are encrypted using the license number as a key. Also, when a message is erroneously blocked, you can copy the mail headers to the Clipboard and run the Exception wizard, which parses the header to whitelist the source.

This wizard and other features are accessed from a tray icon, which lets you manipulate a list of Detectors (collections of related text strings—like "herbal Viagra"—the program looks for to identify spam) and view numerous status indicators and log entries.

In testing, Junk Spy caught a respectable but unimpressive 78.9 percent of spam, but its false-positive rate—about 5.4 percent—was higher than the median, 4.4 percent. In the long term, those who carefully tune the Exception wizard should expect better performance. That won't eliminate the need to keep an eye on Junk Spy, but the app can help those willing to put in some work—especially those using less mainstream mail clients.