The Bottom Line
- Spam Bully has a great spam detection rate using multiple powerful filtering techniques
- You can request confirmations from new senders
- Spam Bully integrates well with Outlook, Windows Mail and Outlook Express
- Spam Bully requires Outlook, Windows Mail or Outlook Express and can mess with their settings
- A pure, not pre-trained Bayesian solution may be more accurate overall
- Spam Bully does not support IMAP accounts in Outlook Express
Description
- Spam Bully is a spam filtering plug-in for Outlook, Windows Mail and Outlook Express.
- Offers lists of approved and banned senders, can import addresses from the Windows address book.
- Can send a challenging message to unknown senders. Responding to the challenge approves them.
- Spam Bully can bounce spam to the sender and access their web site to "punish" them.
- Uses statistics-based (Bayesian) spam filters that learn as you classify incoming mail.
- Spam Bully can forward email (sans the spam) to another email address or cell phone.
- Real-time blackhole list lookups allow Spam Bully to block junk from know spam sources.
- You can use Spam Bully to send out-of-office auto-replies to good mail.
- Spam Bully keeps a detailed log and can show graphical statistics of good versus bad mail.
- Spam Bully supports Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista and Windows Mail/Outlook Express/Outlook.
Guide Review - Spam Bully 4.1 - Spam Filter
It combines several approaches: approved and banned senders, DNS blacklist lookups, challenging messages for unknown senders and Bayesian spam filtering. Though Spam Bully's default combination of filtering tactics is not bad, you can probably still ignore all but the latter safely.
You don't have to fiddle with senders (which Spam Bully makes easy, though) or annoy new contacts. You can avoid the time-consuming blackhole list lookups. Concentrate and rely on the Bayesian filtering instead. The initial corpus is okay, but Spam Bully's filters do a really great job detecting spam (and viruses, too) after some training.
Unfortunately, the filter learns only from mistakes, not from its own correct classifications. Solid integration with Windows Mail, Outlook Express and Outlook makes Spam Bully easy to use, though support for IMAP and Hotmail accounts in Outlook Express and Windows Mail would be a plus.
Using Spam Bully's user-friendly email analysis, you can usually pinpoint the path of spam accurately, and report spammers to their ISPs is easy, too. Spam Bully even lets you "punish" spammers by hitting them with traffic. I'd counsel against using this, though.
It's still a pity you're out of luck if you're not using one of the Microsoft email clients.
