December 13, 2004

9:49 AM

I need recommendations for e-mail spamfilters for the PC. I use (and love) SpamSieve on the Mac, and now need something similar for a friend running Outlook 98 (or 2000, can't remember) on Windows 2000. What's the best PC spamfilter?
posted by jdroth to (8 comments total)

If it's Outlook 2000, you can use spambayes.
posted by gnz2001 at 10:22 AM on December 13, 2004

If the friend only uses Outlook for email, switch to Thunderbird. It's excellent.
posted by gramcracker at 10:31 AM on December 13, 2004

popfile
posted by crunchland at 10:33 AM on December 13, 2004

I use SpamBayes for my Outlook/work mail, and run all my personal Thunderbird/POP mail through PopFile. (I find that the built-in spam filter for T-Bird sucks, but YMMV.) I set my wife up with SpamSieve on our OS X machine, so I've wrestled with each of the options suggested so far.

The big advantage for SpamBayes is that it's tightly integrated into the Outlook client--even better than SpamSieve is into Entourage--so you "train" it just by moving or deleting mail in Outlook.

PopFile, on the other hand, will learn any number of categorizations that you care to teach it (not just "good/bad" like SpamBayes or SpamSieve). You can teach it to sort out your personal mail, your newsletter subscriptions, etc. without having to build a ton of different message filters, which I really like.

The big downside for PopFile, though, is that it's really not integrated into the client--it runs as a proxy POP server, and classifies your mail before it gets passed along to your app.

I understand how this makes it a much more flexible and general solution, but it also means that you've got to use a browser-based interface to train it, outside the mail client itself. Every couple of days or so, you need to fire up the browser interface and comb through the history of mail you've received, correcting any mistakes or unknown classifications, etc. Personally, I don't mind doing that, but it is a bit much to ask for anyone who's not technically inclined.
posted by LairBob at 11:14 AM on December 13, 2004

Though I'll second the recommendations to use Thunderbird over Outlook (as Thunderbird has built-in spam filtering), if you must use Outlook, Outclass is a free implementation of POPFile with Outlook integration.
posted by Alex Handcoding at 11:21 AM on December 13, 2004

Outclass looks cool--I hadn't run across that before. (Now if I could just track down an POPFile integration module for T-bird...)
posted by LairBob at 11:38 AM on December 13, 2004

In this instance, Outlook is the only option. (It's an office environment in which an esoteric feature of old versions of Outlook — shared calendars — is considered vital to daily operations.) Thanks to all, especially LairBob. You've given me a couple of options, one of which I'm sure will work.
posted by jdroth at 11:43 AM on December 13, 2004

Another vote for SpamBayes. If you didn't know already (and you might not, coming from the Mac), you need Lookout. It's like Google for your mail, except that it's integrated into Outlook. I personally love it.
posted by RikiTikiTavi at 12:09 PM on December 13, 2004