• Product: SpamNet
• Direct Price: $3.99 a month or $39.95 a year direct
• Company Info: Cloudmark, www.cloudmark.com

Cloudmark's SpamNet is famous for blocking spam using the opinions of its user community. As SpamNet filters mail, users identify mistakes, pointing out spam that was allowed through or blocked legitimate mail, and the filters are updated accordingly. But you needn't defer to your peers entirely. You can also set up your own whitelist.

Cloudmark offers two versions of SpamNet: one for Outlook and one for Outlook Express. The OE version is still in beta, and when it's finished, the two versions will be rolled out together. Unfortunately, SpamNet doesn't support other clients, but it does handle Exchange as well as POP3 connections. Both versions are exceedingly simple. Each adds no more than three new buttons and a quarantine folder to your mail client. Block and Unblock buttons let you contribute to the community consensus, while a third button opens a short list of tools, letting you configure a whitelist, check your spam statistics, and more. But you can't automatically import your address book into your whitelist.

In our testing, SpamNet correctly blocked 91 percent of incoming spam, and it mistakenly filtered only one legitimate message. And once your whitelist is in place, performance may improve.