• Product: SpamCatcher
• Direct Price: $29.99 direct
• Company Info: Aladdin Systems, www.aladdinsys.com

The last time we reviewed Mailshell's SpamCatcher, we praised its ability to avoid false positives but criticized its spam-catching abilities. Since then SpamCatcher has achieved a much more appropriate balance. It caught 91 percent of our spam, and its false-positive rate rose no higher than 3.2 percent.

SpamCatcher comes in two flavors: one for use with Outlook, and one universal version for use with other POP3 clients. The Outlook version is the more impressive of the two. It integrates tightly with the client, with buttons for quickly adding senders to whitelists or blacklists and a long pull-down menu for quick access to other tools. One complaint: The app can significantly impair Outlook's speed. Using the program with a mailbox filled with thousands of messages, we had difficulty just scrolling through our folders, even when the program wasn't analyzing incoming messages.

SpamCatcher's antispam engine operates much like that of MailFrontier Matador. Its filters rely partly on the opinions of its users. You can contribute to the community consensus via commands accessible from the software's pull-down menu. Unlike many products, SpamCatcher also lets you easily whitelist or blacklist entire domains, and it conveniently lets you choose which Outlook folder you wish to use for quarantined mail.