A Fire Wall For Unwanted E-Mail - software program that detects spam - Brief Article

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Jan, 2001 by Kristin Davis

SOFTWARE | If you're SICK OF SPAM, this program may settle your stomach.

Man: Well, what've you got?

Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and Spam; egg bacon and Spam; egg bacon sausage and Spam; Spam bacon sausage and Spam; Spam egg Spam Spam bacon and Spam; Spam sausage Spam Spam bacon Spam tomato and Spam ...

Does your e-mail box remind you of the breakfast menu in that famous Monty Python skit? One way to get rid of e-mails screaming "Find out anything about anyone!!!" or "Free satellite TV!!!" is to buy e-mail-filtering software that trashes nuisance messages before they land in your mailbox.

SpamKiller is receiving kudos in the computer press. Its publishers at Novasoft say they've analyzed thousands of bulk commercial e-mails to come up with their 2,200 spam sniffing filters, which screen for addresses of known spammers (such as "hot.com" and "horny.com"), subject lines for phrases such as "cable-TV descrambler" and "earn extra cash," and the text of messages for giveaways such as "$$$$$" and "Dear Homeowner."

When the software detects spam, it plucks the message from your e-mail server and moves it to a "killed mail" file that you can check periodically if you're worried you'll miss legitimate mail. But you won't miss, say, a message from the son at college who's tutoring to "earn extra cash" because you can designate regular correspondents as friends whose messages are accepted without screening. (The easiest way to do this is to import your e-mail address book into the program.)

Each time you receive mail you can add the sender as a friend with a click or two of the mouse. Or you can build a filter so that messages from the same sender or with similar content will get junked in the future. You can also fire off a canned "remove me from your list" letter or a complaint to the sender's Internet service provider. (Lots of complaints can get a spammer booted from the service.)

Sound effects, such as rifle shots to notify you of killed spam or chirping birds for friendly mail, are amusing at first. Later you can turn them off and switch to visual cues.

During a monthlong trial, SpamKiller speared 202 junk e-mails (compared with 19 e-mails using a handful of "homemade" filters within Microsoft Outlook Express). But it wasn't perfect. Some spam still slipped through (often marked as "possible spam"), and a few friendly e-mails landed in the killed-mail folder. We took care of the latter problem by altering a few overly rigid filters, including one that kills e-mail when the subject line is blank and another that nixes messages with an "800" number in the text. As you keep adding friends and filters, the program gets better at sifting the wheat from the chaff.

One small annoyance: For SpamKiller to work, you have to turn off automatic mail checking in your e-mail program; otherwise, the program may pull spam off the server before SpamKiller has a chance to zap it. While you can read and print messages within SpamKiller itself, you have to use your e-mail program to reply or use hyperlinks. With some programs this entails a couple of extra mouse clicks, but it's far less trouble than reading all that spam.

You can download SpamKiller from www.spamkiller.com and try it free for 30 days. To keep the program (which we did), you pay $30, which also gets you regularly updated filters. The software works with POP3 and MAPI e-mail accounts, which are the formats used by most Internet e-mail programs, but not by America Online. There is no Macintosh version.

--Reporter: CHRISTINE PULFREY