Steve Pilgrim: "there seems to be an informal consensus around SpamAssassin as the right tool for frying spam..."
I've been having second thoughts about SpamNet this week. It seems to be letting more messages in than it did previously. Perhaps a database problem on their end or just due to spammers constantly creating new forged return addresses. But, the price is right for an underemployed web designer like me and I don't play the "wishlist" game, so I'll stick with it a while longer and see if it improves. All in all, it has made dealing with spam easier for me and up to a few days ago, it was catching almost every single spam message sent to me - this week, it's catching about 2/3 of them. [jenett.radio]
Well, I'm no longer running Outlook since I'm not at that job anymore, but as far as tools for outlook go, SpamNet is pretty damn cool. I was hoping to try out SpamAssassin Pro too, which is a pay version of spamassassin that works with Outlook. I think it might actually be a tad better then spamnet because spamassassin will query Razor (which is basicly what spamnet is querying if I understand things correctly).
If you're a mac user there's also a solution for you coming out in the next few weeks. The new version of the Mail application that comes with OS X has a learning spam filter. As mail comes in it seems to start with some basic rules for identifying spam. But then you can go through and start tagging messages as spam (or untagging ones that aren't spam). Once you feel it does a good job of marking spam you put it into 'automatic' mode and it will filter that spam into a folder. I kind of like the idea of an adaptive tool like this, since spam is always in flux. The next step is to merge something like this with Razor.
