Spam is anonymous, unsolicited bulk e-mail. This is the description used most often in the U.S. and Europe, and serves as a basis upon which anti-spam laws are being enacted. In addition to wasting people's time, this electronic junk mail also eats up a lot of network bandwidth. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is also applied to similar abuses in other media, such as instant messaging, usenet newsgroups, Web search engines, spam in blogs and wikis, etc., that are launched with spoofed or harvested sender addresses to conceal the actual sender.
It is estimated that at least 85% of all e-mail worldwide is spam. Spammers make money from the small percentage of recipients that actually respond to their pitches, so for spam to be cost-effective, the initial mails have to be sent in mass quantities. In addition to advertising goods and services, spam is often used for political messages, financial scams, so-called charities, chain letters and vehicles for spreading spyware.
What is an Anti-Spam Application?
An anti-spam application is a software program that detects unsolicited and unwanted bulk e-mail, and prevents these transmissions from reaching the user. Anti-spam applications are also called spam filters, e-mail filters, spam blocking software, anti-spam filters, spam filtering software, Bayesian filters, anti-spam, and other names.
Why You Need an Anti-Spam Application:
Spam is more than a nuisance. It can display potentially offensive content and spread malicious programming. Spambots - programs that harvest e-mail addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists for sending unsolicited e-mail -are clearly an invasion of privacy. Spammers also purchase access to botnets form bot herders. Botnets, networks of compromised computers, are used without their owners’ knowledge or permission to send vast quantities of spam. If you are noticing a slowdown in computer processing speed, it is possible that a percentage of your computational power is being used to launch spam.
How We Rate Anti-Spam Applications:
All Star Reviews’ experts provide our readers with a quick, high level review and in-depth technical review of each application and then rate the top anti-spam applications according the following criteria:
- How it Works: The technologies used and dependencies on e-mail program.
- Effectiveness: The ability of the product to block spam. If it is a filter, the effectiveness and intelligence of the filter; its ability to learn over time which of your e-mails are spam and which are not.
- Impact: The stability of the product and the impact it will have on computer performance.
- Price: the retail price of a single license for each anti-spam product reviewed.
- Dollar Value: The effectiveness of the product with respect to the retail price of a single license for each anti-spam product reviewed.
- Ease of Use: The intuitiveness of each anti-spam product reviewed; the relative ease with which a user can benefit from the technology without having to overcome a steep learning curve. This category also includes helpful features, such as the ability of the user to preview e-mails on the server.
- Installation: The ease with which the product is installed and set up.
- Platforms Supported: A link to a free scans for each product, where applicable.
- System Requirements: The Operating systems, available RAM and disk space, services, and applications required to use the product
- Customer Support: The comprehensiveness and availability of customer support for each anti-spam product reviewed.
- More Information: A link to the manufacturer’s Web site for each anti-spam product reviewed.