Matador 1.0.0.89 By Larry J. Seltzer February 25, 2003

• Product: Matador 1.0.0.89
• Direct Price: $29.95 direct
• Company Info: MailFrontier Inc., www.mailfrontier.com

Editor Rating:

Matador found the highest percentage of spam on our tests—only 7.1 percent of spam messages got by it—but had one of the highest instances of false positives, filtering out 8.4 percent of our legitimate e-mails. Only SpamButcher did worse. Version 1.0 works only with Outlook 2000 and 2002, although MailFrontier claims support will arrive soon for Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, and Eudora. Matador integrates directly into Outlook and can protect POP3, Exchange, and IMAP mail but not Hotmail.

Matador's rules-based filtering (with adjustable weights for such criteria as sexual content and get rich quick), along with whitelisting and blacklisting, determines which e-mails get junked. Also, as with Mailshell and SpamNet, the user community helps train the application; every time you click the Junk button, a secure thumbprint of the message goes to MailFrontier.

The most interesting thing about Matador, however, is how it treats possible spam. By default, if it's suspicious of a message from an unknown sender, Matador automatically sends that sender a challenge e-mail asking a simple question that requires human interaction, such as "How many kittens are in this picture?" (see the screen shot above). If Matador gets the correct response, it white-lists the sender. If not, the sender is blacklisted. Challenges are not sent to users in your Contacts list or to recipients in the Sent Items folder.

It's unfair to expect products to read your mind, but almost every commercial e-mail we received was challenged. Of the 130 challenges Matador issued in testing, 31 were to commercial list managers that would not respond properly but whose messages we wanted to receive. You can turn challenges off but probably won't until after Matador has sent some out. We'd like an option to let users confirm each challenge before it is sent.

We spent more time training Matador than the other products, because it initially generated so many false positives. Training Matador to block or allow a sender or a whole domain, however, is easy using the Outlook toolbar and menus.

We had intermittent stability problems with Matador when it was connected to POP3 servers. Since Matador is integrated with Outlook, it can cause Outlook to fail when Matador fails, although Outlook is good at disabling unstable add-ins. We didn't have these problems when we accessed mail on an Exchange server.