Matador
2.0
By Cade
Metz and Larry Seltzer
May 27, 2003
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Editor Rating: 
Matador's spam filtering has improved a great deal since
we reviewed Version 1.0. It was the second-best filtering
product here in correctly identifying spam as spam (catching
85.1 percent of unwanted messages), though it also
incorrectly pegged 1.5 percent of legitimate messages as
spam (the second-worst here).
Matador works with Outlook 2000, Outlook 2002, and
Outlook Express 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. Through Outlook Express,
you can also filter Hotmail, IMAP, and MSN mail. Matador
integrates well with Outlook, for example, automatically
whitelisting users in the Contacts folder and recipients in
the Sent Items folder. Under Outlook Express, however,
Matador operates in the background after all messages are
received, so we had difficulty knowing when it had completed
filtering the in-box.
The application's most distinctive feature is the ability
to issue challenges: If Matador cannot discern whether a
message is spam or not, it sends an e-mail to the sender.
This challenge message asks the user to respond with the
answer to a specific question. If the response is correct,
Matador adds the user to the whitelist.
Its good (if somewhat aggressive) spam-catching ability,
plus the challenge response layer, make this version of
Matador worth a look.
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