McAfee Spamkiller

Getting Rid of Unwanted E-mail Clutter

by Jim Bray

Don’t you just love spam, that endless supply of unwanted and unwelcome e-mail that constantly inflicts itself on your inbox?

I must get 300 or more spams a day and it drives me nuts. And you thought it was the water where I live!

Anyway, there’s plenty you can do to fight spam; my Internet Service Provider offers a filter that stops quite a bit - but it also bounced back some of the e-mail I wanted to receive. Then McAfee sent me Spamkiller and I had a new defender of my inbox.

Spamkiller, now in version 4, looks over your incoming e-mail before it gets to your actual e-mail program, matching certain parameters of an incoming message and tossing it into the virtual big round file if it recognizes it as spam. It comes with a bunch of spam filters built in, and you can train it to recognize new spam by characters in the return address, subject line, or even the body of the message.

When I installed Spamkiller, it looked over my e-mail address book and created filters to let through messages from my existing circle of virtual friends - and that part has worked very well. It’s by no means perfect, and since these spammers seem far smarter than they have any right to be, too much offending material still gets through. And because Spamkiller looks over every e-mail before your e-mail program receives it, it tends to mark some new messages as read - which makes them hard to find in your inbox.

That, to me, is the biggest drawback to Spamkiller - but I'd still rather be with it than without it. I've been using it for a couple of months now and about twice a day have collected enough spam to warrant deleting them from the software.

Spamkiller gathers most spam into one place where you can either rescue it (if you’re some kind of nut), delete spams individually or all at once - and you can even send a message of complaint back to the source - as if they really care.

You can also set up filters for each new spam, so Spamkiller will recognize it subsequently. This sounds good but, I’ve found it a lot quicker to just let the stuff pile up inside Spamkiller, as mentioned above, and then delete the whole shebang at once. It’s less hassle because, with the amount of spam I receive, I’d spend the whole day setting up filters that, since spammers use a lot of tricks to get around filters, may or may not work.

Spamkiller isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good and it beats the alternative of unlimited spam.

Jim Bray's technology columns are distributed by the TechnoFILE and Mochila Syndicates. Copyright Jim Bray.

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