Page 1 of Free anti-spam download

:(Can anyone recommend free anti spam download, Thanks Alzie

Popfiles

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl

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Spampal from www.Spampal.org is the most effective I have seen. It`s disadvantage is that it is difficult to use but once it`s set up properly it knocks the socks off similar offerings from McAfee, Kaspersky, Symantec, etc. It will detect about 4 in 10 spam emails which is very good considering the nearest competitor will remove only about 20%. Also it won`t delete mail that it considers to be spam even if it is legitimate mail - some anti-spam programs will DELETE email that is not even spam. And what`s more, it is free.

er 4 in 10 spam mails ?
I`ll second a vote for popfile which filtered out most spam prior to virgin and freeserve/wanadoo implementing their own fairly effective filters at source

Yes, 4 out of 10 as opposed to Popfile which managed 17% success rate with our test data. If you actually try both you will see how much of an improvement SpamPal has over over free software. Try it and post your results, cynic and prove me wrong.

I did get it wrong when I said SpamPal beats Symantec, however. It actually doesn`t so I did Symantec a disservice. Norton`s AntiSpam at £10 achieves a 70% success rate.

Hmmm, did you use popfile correctly? It has to be trained. The two computers I`ve installed it on now have a very high success rate - very few emails are catogrised incorrectly, and I`m talking maybe 1000 spam emails a week.

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yup needs training, not one of those that relies on downloading lists of known spammers and lists of trigger words. It builds them up from a base set as it goes along.
Current stats indicate 6,291 emails checked with only 48 wrongly identified and a success rate of over 99%. Throwing a load of spam at popfile to test it will not give helpful results.

This item was edited on Friday, 5th August 2005, 14:04

The poor success rate of algorithmic spam filters is due to the fact that they can not be overagressive as they`ll delete emails that are genuine, and this in turn means that their algorithms are easily circumvented: see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3458457.stm

So popfile needs to be trained? Sounds awfully like cloudmark, which was free, but now attracts a very small monthly fee. But the huge database of spams and contributing users it has amassed is it`s strength. It relies on its (millions of) users to report spam. If a spam is reported by enough people, then all subscribers to cloudmark will no longer get that spam (or it will be moved to a junk folder). With such a wide user base, it is streets ahead of any other system available.

This item was edited on Friday, 5th August 2005, 17:57

and requires you to pay for it.
popfile is good enough for getting rid of most spam. It doesn`t delete them just moves them to the delete box and training includes telling it when it marked a valid email as spam as well as spam not correctly marked.

If a Bayesian algorithm based Spam filter must be used then Spambayes beats Popfile. Algorithm based Spam filters are easily circumvented which is why random words appear at the bottom of spam mail.