Review: Cloudmark Desktop Spam Blocker

Kai Chandler sees the light with Cloudmark Desktop Spam Blocker

Product	Cloudmark Desktop Spam Blocker
Company	Cloudmark
Web	Click here for full details and free 15-day trial of Cloudmark
Price	$39.95 per year – covers two PCs
We like	Very elegant and accurate
We don't like	Expensive over time.
Rating	9/10
Requirements	Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook or Outlook Express

A recent report* tells us that

• UK computer users are now number three on the global hit list for spam gangs
• a staggering 20 billion messages are sent to the UK every day which is double that of 2006
• 98% of all email traffic is now spam
• Spam is now a $200 billion business.

I can certainly believe that as I receive about 400 emails a day most of which are spam; or to give it a more formal name - Unsolicited Commercial Email or UCE.

Will Cloudmark Desktop save the day?

To my enormous relief, one of the top spam blockers is now available for my mail client: Mozilla Thunderbird, as well as already supporting Outlook and Outlook Express.

I've tried a number of spam blockers over the years, and they all have their pros and cons. Some work well, others don't even make it past the starting line. Mailwasher has been successfully used here for several years and it would take something very elegant to tempt me away.

Cloudmark (formerly SpamNet) works in a completely different way from Mailwasher - while Mailwasher lists all the mail on your POP3 mailserver and suggests which can be deleted, Cloudmark first downloads all the mail to your computer then automatically moves suspected spam to a Spam folder.

Any spam blocker lives or dies by how well it splits the spam out from your real email. Cloudmark's approach relies on users reporting back whether a message is legitimate or spam. With around a million users, the intelligence built up is remarkably accurate and up to date. Bulk commercial emails, phishing emails and viruses are generally filtered out.

Installation is a breeze - Cloudmark installs a simple toolbar in your mail client. It also creates a Spam folder. Whenever mail is downloaded it's analyzed and moved into the Spam folder if suspect. I found that all this happens in under half a second per email, so if you have a heavy mailbag it can take a short time, but that's nothing compared with the time you are saving over using a less competent spam blocker.

In my tests over a couple of months, I found it remarkable that Cloudmark was so accurate. It was almost uncanny how few spam mails were kept in my inbox (false negatives) and no wanted messages made it to the spam folder. On the rare occasion I spotted a spam message in my inbox, I just clicked the Cloudmark button, it was moved to the Spam folder without any fuss, and information sent back to Cloudmark's network to identify that particular message as spam. If a number of other users flag the same message then Cloudmark's filter will activate for the benefit of other users.

Cloudmark does its own housekeeping, as it purges your spam folder to delete anything over a certain age - you can set this yourself but the default is seven days. It was slightly spooky the first time I noticed the count of messages in the Spam folder counting down. It's not limited to scanning new mail - it can also scan an existing folder.

Although Cloudmark works brilliantly "out of the box" there's also an options tab where you can add email addresses, perhaps of friends, or those in your address book, whose emails are never to be checked.

If there's a downside to Cloudmark, it's that it is relatively costly. At $39.95 USD per annum it quickly works out more expensive than products with a one-off cost although the purchase allows you to run it on two computers. It's definitely worth trying Cloudmark if you need to cut Spam out of your life.

* IronPort Systems Dec 2007

 

Kai Chandler reviews top tools for family friendly surfing at www.surfcontrols.com