McAfee SpamKiller By Cade Metz February 17, 2004

• Product: McAfee SpamKiller
• Direct Price: $34.95 a year, direct
• Company Info: McAfee Security, www.mcafee.com

Editor Rating:

If you're already a McAfee customer, using such apps as McAfee VirusScan or Personal Firewall+, McAfee SpamKiller is worth looking into. Like other McAfee apps, it fits neatly into SecurityCenter, the company's unified user interface. But in the end, we can't recommend using it. To begin with, SpamKiller does not integrate with your e-mail client as tightly as it should: You have to open a separate window to check your quarantine folder. It's also painfully slow. Once you get to the quarantine folder, the program takes another few seconds to open a message. Third and most important, SpamKiller was one of the poorest performers during testing at pc Magazine Labs. It blocked only 64 percent of spam, and it quarantined half of our legitimate messages. The app is sure to improve with customization, but a 50 percent false-positive rate—even on a first run—is unacceptable.

On the upside, SpamKiller supports Hotmail and Exchange accounts, not just POP3. And it offers an unusually wide range of tools for customizing its antispam engine. You can easily add addresses to your whitelists and blacklists, view and edit individual filters, and even use different settings with different e-mail addresses on the same machine.