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
http://www.lavasoft.de/software/
3.00
1
ChoiceMail One from DigiPortal
http://www.digiportal.com/choicemail.html
