Anti-Spam 2005
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As part of its eTrust range of products, aimed at the home and home office market, CA (the new designation of Computer Associates) has released Anti-Spam 2005. This product has been designed to stop the deluge of unwanted emails, otherwise known as Spam, which afflicts our mail boxes on a regular basis.
Installing this title is fairly straightforward although a degree of patience is required as you are forced to wait before the procedure kicks into action. Fortunately the supplied instructions inform you that there will be a delay before anything happens after inserting the CD into the drive. You will need to enter a 23-character (hyphens included) license key and a reboot will be required before using the program. eTrust Anti-Spam integrates itself with either Outlook or Outlook Express. Unfortunately I have been unable to ascertain whether it will work with other non-Microsoft email clients.
When starting Outlook or Outlook Express for the first time after installing eTrust Anti-Spam, you will discover that the email client has been hijacked by a configuration procedure. This will need to be completed before you can gain access to your email client. This procedure is necessary so that a list of approved senders can be created. The whole process is carried automatically using data from your address book and is relatively quick. Only message from those on your approved sender list will be delivered to your Inbox while any others will be redirected to an Anti-Spam folder where they will be quarantined for action later. From time to time, reminders will be given regarding items in this quarantine folder.
Once the configuration process is completed, you will be sent to a website that provides help in the form of a tutorial and information relating to spam. This only happens the once and you can either access your email from your browser or close it down and restart your email client. While I have no timing figures to back it up, I had the distinct impression that any email activity, whether download, moving or deleting, was slower with Anti-Spam in residence. It was also noticeable that eTrust Anti-Spam is only interested in POP3 and MAPI accounts. It totally ignored any messages arriving via various web-based (Hotmail/MSN) accounts.
A drop-down menu option appears as part of the Outlook or Outlook Express interface. This menu gives you access to the quarantine folder for moving or deleing messages; viewing and editing approved senders; and setting options regarding reminders and how often they appear. There are also a couple of buttons which can be used to assign approved or blocked status to senders.
While the product was easy to set up, as the program did all the work, this inability to work with web based email accounts does count against it. If you just use POP3 or MAPI accounts then there should be no problem and your incoming spam messages should reduce to a trickle or hopefully become non-existent.
Anti-Spam, as mentioned previously, requires any version of Outlook 2000 or Outlook Express 5.5 or later with any version of Windows from 98 onwards. You will need to 2MB of available hard disk space. A download version will cost £19.95 or £29.90 with a backup CD.
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Comment by jonw, 5 Jan 2006 21:51