SpamCatcher 2.1h

Editors Note: When this review appeared in the print edition of PC Magazine (February 25, 2003), Deersofts SpamAssassin was awarded our Editors Choice. However, as we noted in the SpamAssassin review, Network Associates acquired Deersoft as we were going to press. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us at the time, Network Associates has decided to pull SpamAssassin Pro from the market. According to Network Associates, SpamAssassins core technology will be integrated into the next release of its other personal anti-spam tool, SpamKiller. Since the primary purpose of our Editors Choice is to provide a buying recommendation for our readers, and since our readers were not able to purchase SpamAssassin during the period that the issue was shipped to subscribers and available on the newsstand, we must rescind the Editors Choice from that product. We hereby award Editors Choice to Mailshells SpamCatcher, which originally received an honorable mention in the story.

Mailshells SpamCatcher adds spam filtering to Outlook 2000 or 2002. It rarely misidentified legitimate mail, but we were disappointed with the amount of spam that still reached our in-box. SpamCatcher integrates well into Outlook and supports any type of server that you can use with the mail program, including Hotmail. Mailshell also provides an Internet-based service for spam filtering, which works with almost any mail client, though we hope Mailshell will release a client-side version that includes support for other popular e-mail clients such as Outlook Express.