SpamNet and Matador: A fighting chance against spam

The three products are all based on the same clever idea; they take the peer-to-peer concept and extend it to fighting spam. The way they both work is relatively simple: You have to download an applet to your machine to run inside Outlook.

Now, maybe the more cynical of you would say that it serves me right for running such an e-mail system that encourages all sorts of script kiddies to take advantage of my computer, but I have grown accustomed to Outlook's address book and other non-e-mail features, and I don't really want to switch out of all that right at the moment. SpamNet and Matador give me a fighting chance.

These products are an alternative to running an enterprise-class spam filtering service, such as provided by Brightmail. They are free of charge and easier to install. (IHateSpam is $20, but the free download at http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/product.cfm?id=930 is fully functional for 30 days.)

Note that I am reviewing both Matador and SpamNet here. You only need to run one product or the other. I didn't get a chance to test out IHateSpam, which has a version that supports Outlook Express, but it looks like it operates similarly to the others.

The two products pretty much do the same thing. As e-mail arrives in your inbox, either product screens it to see if someone else has already reported it as spam on its network of users. If there is a match, the software moves the message to another folder where you can review it and delete the messages at your leisure. There is really nothing for you to do, other than enjoy a relatively spam-free inbox. I say relatively because the software doesn't catch everything, of course. In my tests, I found each product took care of about 75% of the spam I received. You can check the statistics page in Outlook's Options | SpamNet menu because SpamNet doesn't have its own interface outside of this settings sheet.

Matador has a few more buttons to control its activities and has its own separate application and interface. It has five tabs: people, companies, messages, challenges and reports. The reports never seemed to match what was actually happening on my computer. Both the people and companies tabs allow you to explicitly block or allow particular e-mail addresses or domains, respectively. The challenge tab includes settings that can make Matador more or less restrictive about its filters. SpamNet has something similar for this, as well.

One thing I didn't see were any false positives. Meaning that neither SpamNet nor Matador identified something as spam that was an e-mail message from a legit user.

I had some problems with both software products, some of which may be attributed to early betas that I was using. There was a conflict when I happened to run Norton's Anti-Virus Live Update at the same time that SpamNet's updater tried to run. I had to reboot my machine to get out of that one. And sometimes SpamNet would blow up Outlook 2000 and I would have to restart Outlook. But I am not convinced that was something unique to SpamNet, as I had problems with Outlook stability prior to installing SpamNet.

Neither SpamNet nor Matador work with IMAP mail servers because they inspect the contents of the message and IMAP connections just download typically the mail headers.

Using a peer-to-peer network is a good idea when it comes to fighting spam, and the early versions of SpamNet and Matador show lots of promise but aren't quite ready for prime time. Once both companies work out the bugs, I think this will be a must-have application for any Outlook user.

Strom-meter key:
**** = Very cool, very useful
*** = Hey, not bad. One notch below very cool
** = A tad shaky to install and use but has some value.
* = Don't waste your time. Minimal real value.