10 replies to this topic

[Mel]

I have just set upSpamkiller 4.0 on my system, and while I like the idea behind the software the implementation seems to be lacking.

My problem is that when getting my first batch of emails in the morning, it was common to get up to 250 spam emails which I could download and delete in half an hour or so, but it seemed there should be a better way to do it.

Now that I have Spamkiller, it takes up to an hour and a half before they deliver my first batch of spam free email. This does not improve my productivity at all.

I am running a 1.5 ghz PC with 512 megs of ddr ram, 120 gbytes of hard drives and a DSL connection. McAfee support says I should defrag my hard drives, but Disk keeper monitors my drives full time and keeps the framentation down to almost nil. All my other programs run fast and smooth,and that includes things like Dreamweaver and Photoshop.

The user support using the McAfee online chat was not a nice experience with the guy on the other end apparently handling four or five queries at once and would not listen when I told him my hard drives did not need to have the MS defrag run on them.

Anybody experienced this or have a fix for it? I have already set the server timeouts to five minutes, and when I look at the data transfer I see that the files are being transfered 200 bytes at a time.

[dragonlady7]

Holy cow, an hour and a half??
And you can't see any email until it's done?
Oooof. Perhaps that's not the anti-spam software that suits you best...

[Jill]

CloudMark's SpamNet has been very good for me and my thousands of spams a day.

Jill

[Mel]

Thanks for the replies. I finally removed the !@#$% thing and used the CD for target practice on the skeet range. Silly, but it made me feel a lot better.

Have now downloaded and installed a new program called Spambully, and must say I am impressed.

It took about five minutes to install, then the program went through all the stored emails in Outlook (there are hundreds of them) in about another ten minutes and added all those addresses to my good list. In fifteen minutes the program was ready to go and I downloaded my usual 250 emails in five minutes, which were sorted with only one mistake (in real time as the messages downloaded) This is Good Enough for me.

This program looks like its going to do all that I want and is supposed to get better as it sorts more mails for you. There is a free trial Here

[Vertster]

I use Cloudmark Spamnet as well, and it works very well for me! I recommend you check it out!

[Mel]

I did check out Cloudmarks spamnet, and one thing especially bothered me.

According to the sales copy if someone marks an email as spam, it disappears from the Inbox of everybody using the program, and I suppose that it will prevent further deliveries from that address.

First problem is that I generally don't like someone else determining what it is I'm going to see. Then suppose that someone marked Jills newsletter as spam would that mean no one would get that issue or...??

SpamBully on the other hand starts off with a very good filter and then uses my inbox and saved messages to learn who or not, and then uses my actions in marking spam and letting mails through to further learn what I would like to see. It started out with a batch of 187 emails, made one error on that batch, and since then has vetted over 500 emails with only two errors.

While the 4.99 per month is not a big cost it is $60 per year, Spambully costs half that for the purchase of the program, including updates and great support.

I think I have found the answer to Spam mail, at least for me.

[Jill]

Mel, SpamNet does often mark my newsletter and other newsletters as spam. But the beauty of spamnet is you simply find it in your delete box, and "unblock" it. Once you've done this 2 times to the same newsletter, it will NEVER get blocked again.

Now that I've been using it for awhile, I rarely have to check my delete box too carefully. All the newsletters I get have been marked as unblocked and I never have to worry about them being deleted again.

Nothing gets deleted fully anyway. And as with any spam protection, you will always have to give at least a cursory glance to your delete folder to make sure good stuff isn't mixed in.

All I can say is the spamnet method is the most foolproof of any of the other methods I've used. Filters by subject just don't work any more and you lose way more that way. The fact that you can unblock permanently whatever you want with spamnet makes it great. You just need some time for it to be set properly. After that, you're good to go!

I highly, highly, highly recommend it. It's worth the $4 or $5 per month. Most definitely!



Jill

[Mel]

Take a look at Spambully, I tried them both. :thumbsup:

[Haystack]

Spamnet rocks. I've had it installed for 20 days now and have the following stats:

Total messages checked: 12,883
I've blocked 404 (messages missed by SpamNet)
SpamNet stopped: 3,598
Time saved (calculated by SpamNet): 9.98 Hours

It took a little over a week to work through the unblocking of newsletters it caught. It seems like some people have chosen to label messages as spam rather than just unsubscribing to them, like weekly travel emails that are clearly opt-in.

[Mel]

By contrast SpamBully works very well for me. It has learned who to accept emails from and who not to by analyzing my email folders and after blocking 4436 spam mails in the past week it so far has made less than one mistake per day (where I have to either declare a message as spam or not)

I like the idea of the software configuring its basic spam filters to my email traffic and address book.

[Haystack]

Taking your address book into into consideration certainly makes sense.