Qurb Dumps Junk Mail

Enough spam makes it through the corporate e-mail filter that I still use a desktop junk-mail blocker on my PC. Lately, Ive been using Version 3.0 of Qurbs namesake product. Qurb 3.0, which became available in February, costs $29.95 for an individual copy, and volume discounts are available. (If you want anti-spam capabilities plus rapid e-mail search, you can get a 14-day Qurb 3.0 evaluation.)

I think Qurb 3.0 is well worth considering for departmental deployments where additional anti-spam protection is needed—but not for the reasons a spam-blocking tool normally gets used.

Qurbs search abilities are what really caught my eye. I was able to easily search my entire collection of e-mail in a split second.

In addition, I had only to enter part of a phone number from my caller ID; Qurb had all the e-mail from that person at my fingertips before I could say "Hello."

Qurb 3.0s e-mail search utility is similar to Lookout, Microsofts speedy search utility for Outlook. In fact, I encourage anyone who uses e-mail as a virtual file cabinet to evaluate Lookout. However, Qurbs search utility does Lookout one better by continuously re-indexing messages so that search results are always up-to-date.

The biggest problem with Qurb is that it requires users to sort through quarantined messages—Qurb depends on an allowed list of senders along with some basic sender authentication, which inbound mail must pass to make it to the in-box. Much of my e-mail comes from people who have never written to me before, so a lot of it ends up in quarantine.

To be fair, most other anti-spam tools—terrified of causing a false positive—allow all sorts of junk mail through and depend on users to delete junk out of the in-box. Qurbs method isnt that tedious, and the product provides frequent reminders to check the quarantine file. Qurb also makes it quite easy to resurrect messages.

Check out eWEEK.coms for more on IM and other collaboration technologies.