How Readers Rate Spam Filters
Web Marketing Today, Issue 131, December 3, 2003
In November 2003, 693 of my readers answered a brief questionnaire about how their spam filters were working. They comprised five groups:
(1) those with no spam filters who manually delete spam (18%), (2) those who rely on their Internet Service Provider's spam filters to catch spam before it gets to them (23%), (3) those whose company filters out spam before it gets to them (13%), (4) those who have installed a spam filter on their desktop computer to filter out the spam (22%), and (5) those who use filters on their e-mail program to filter spam by words and senders (24%). I asked participants to rate how their spam filtering system worked: excellent, pretty well, okay, and poor. Of the various approaches, participants were much happier with individual filtering than the other approaches. The graph below indicates which approaches were rated excellent by participants.
Individual Spam Filters
I thought it would be helpful to my readers to show which individual desktop spam filters were most popular.
I also asked readers to rate the effectiveness of their filter. I only graphed user ratings for spam filters which received more than three votes in the survey, so that the results would be more reliable. The rating scale of how the filter was working was Excellent -- 4, Pretty Well -- 3, Okay -- 2, and Poor 1.
Here's an alphabetical list of all the valid individual spam filters my readers reported, the average rating, and the number of readers who selected each:
|
Filter Name |
Average Rating |
Count in Survey |
|
Ad Aware from Lavasoft |
3.00 |
1 |
|
ChoiceMail One from DigiPortal |
2.33 |
3 |
|
Corvigo |
3.00 |
1 |
|
Disruptor OL from Holger Lembke |
3.00 |
1 |
|
Ella for Outlook from WebAttack |
2.00 |
1 |
|
Eudora 6.0 SpamWatch from QUALCOMM |
3.50 |
4 |
|
iHateSpam from Sunbelt Software |
2.00 |
4 |
|
InBoxer from Autotrieve |
3.00 |
2 |
|
K9 from Robin Keir |
4.00 |
2 |
|
MailBox Filter from Triumvirate Technologies |
4.00 |
2 |
|
MailWasher from FireTrust |
2.97 |
33 |
|
Matador from MailFrontier |
3.67 |
3 |
|
Mozilla Bayesian Spam Filtering |
2.00 |
1 |
|
Norton AntiSpam from Symantec |
2.80 |
5 |
|
POPFile from John Graham-Cumming |
4.00 |
6 |
|
Qurb from Qurb, Inc. |
3.00 |
2 |
|
SAproxy Pro from Stata Labs |
4.00 |
1 |
|
Spam Arrest from Spam Arrest, LLC |
2.50 |
2 |
|
Spam Inspector from GIANT Company Software |
2.00 |
1 |
|
SpamPal from James Farmer |
2.00 |
1 |
|
SpamAssassin at SourceForge |
3.00 |
11 |
|
SpamBayes from Tim Peters, et al. |
3.60 |
5 |
|
SpamBouncer from Catherine A. Hampton |
3.00 |
1 |
|
SpamCatcher from Aladdin Systems |
2.00 |
2 |
|
SpamCop.net |
3.50 |
2 |
|
SPAMfighter |
3.00 |
2 |
|
SpamFire from MatterForm Media |
3.00 |
3 |
|
SpamHunter at SourceForge |
4.00 |
1 |
|
SpamKiller from McAfee |
2.67 |
3 |
|
SpamNet from CloudMark |
3.25 |
20 |
|
Spamnix from Spamnix Software |
3.67 |
3 |
|
SpamPal from James Farmer |
3.00 |
5 |
|
SpamSlam from Ilesa |
4.00 |
1 |
|
SpamSubtract from interMute |
2.00 |
1 |
|
VetoMail from VetoMail Pty. Ltd. |
4.00 |
1 |
|
Total |
137 |
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