• Product: SAproxy Pro
• Direct Price: $29.95 direct
• Company Info: Stata Labs Inc., www.statalabs.com

Based on the open-source mail filter app SpamAssassin, Stata Labs' SAproxy Pro ranks with the market's most effective antispam utilities. During testing, without any customization, it blocked 89 percent of our spam, with a false-positive rate of under 2 percent. The trouble is, although SAproxy works with any POP3 mail client, it reaches its full potential only when used with Stata Labs' own client, Bloomba.

If you're a Bloomba user, SAproxy installs quickly and easily. It automatically shuttles suspected spam to Bloomba's existing quarantine folder, and it activates a button on the Bloomba toolbar that lets you easily train its Bayesian filter. If you use Outlook, Outlook Express, or some other client, installation is more difficult. And if you don't use Bloomba, you can't train SAproxy's Bayesian filter. You must manually update your client settings to route mail through SAproxy, and unless you create a new rule with your client, suspected spam will only be tagged as such, not filtered into its own folder. (Stata Labs provides video tutorials for this and other topics on its Web site.)

Otherwise, SAproxy works just as well with third-party clients. You can create whitelists and blacklists, filter based on specific words or phrases, or even instruct the app to remove potentially dangerous content, such as attachments, from suspected spam automatically.