Spam Buster By May 7, 2002

• Product: Spam Buster
• Direct Price: Free; ad-free version, $19.95
• Company Info: Contact Plus Corp., www.contactplus.com/products/spam

Editor Rating:

Spam Buster works by checking your mailbox independent of your mail client and deleting messages that it recognizes as spam. It bases its decision exclusively on a message's header and size, as returned by the POP's TOP command. Spam Buster does not have to download the entire message from your mailbox, which makes it faster than SpamKiller, and also prevents a server that removes mail once it's been retrieved from deleting mail that's been checked before you actually download it.

But since it looks only at the headers, the filter has less to work with and may give even more false positives. Given a mailbox containing 25 messages (none spam), Spam Buster misidentified 5 of them as spam. One had been sent by a user with a blacklisted@ earthlink.net address. Another was blocked, ironically, because the sender used a disposable e-mail address—the jumble of digits in the randomly generated address triggered the filter. Spam Buster can work with servers that use POP, but not with AOL, IMAP, or Web-based e-mail services.

Unfortunately, Spam Buster competes with your mail client for use of your mailbox and is thus subject to what programmers call a race condition. When you're using Spam Buster, you can't set your mail client to check mail periodically. If you do, your mail client might download recently arrived spam before Spam Buster has a chance to remove it from your mailbox. Spam Buster does not incorporate the ability to check DNS blacklists (such as those published by MAPS) but does have the ability to see whether the sender's host name resolves to an IP address.

No spam-reporting or automatic-upgrade features are available, nor does Spam Buster have the ability to import an address book as a white list automatically. We also encountered runtime errors (which, fortunately, were not destructive) during our tests of the program.