Entered CNET Catalog: 05/29/2002
SKU: CNETSPAMKILLER
Manufacturer: McAfee
CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 06/10/2002
Originally developed by Novasoft, this five-year-old shareware spam slayer was recently purchased by McAfee.com, which cleaned up a few bugs. The result? For $39.95, you get a veteran spam buster that boasts thousands of built-in and customizable filters for ridding your PC of unwanted e-mail. If you receive only a few pieces of spam a day, just delete the pesky messages by hand. Otherwise, download McAfee.com SpamKiller posthaste.
 Editors' Note:
On January 6, 2003, McAfee bought Deersoft and announced plans to merge SpamAssassin Pro with McAfee's own Spam Killer product later in this year. A full review of Spam Killer 4.0 will be available shortly.
|
By Dan Tynan
Originally developed by Novasoft, this five-year-old shareware spam slayer was recently purchased by McAfee.com, which cleaned up a few bugs. The result? For $39.95, you get a veteran spam buster that boasts thousands of built-in and customizable filters for ridding your PC of unwanted e-mail. If you receive only a few pieces of spam a day, just delete the pesky messages by hand. Otherwise, download McAfee.com SpamKiller posthaste.
Natural-born killer
SpamKiller's premise is simple: before you check your e-mail, SpamKiller fetches messages from the mail server, then filters them based on your restrictions and its built-in rules. Suspected spam ends up in your Killed Mail folder, where you can review it before deleting it; good mail goes to your SpamKiller in-box. Once you've cleansed the mail of spam, just launch your e-mail client and download only the leftover mail.
Installing SpamKiller is a breeze; click your way through a wizard, then reboot. The program picks up your existing SMTP server settings. The only snag: in our tests, SpamKiller found settings for RoadRunner, an ISP we hadn't used in nearly two years. (SpamKiller's tech support was unable to come up with a reason for this.) We had to set up our account manually, which is easy enough to do. Just click the Accounts button, then click Add and follow along with the wizard.
Good filters
SpamKiller's strength lies in its thousands of preexisting filters. It sifts e-mail by the sender's name, the message header, the subject, the message text, and the country of origin. It also flags mail that it's not sure about. For example, if you've copied yourself on a message, SpamKiller sends it to your in-box with a question mark attached because the From address equals the To address, a common tactic used by spammers.
Curiously, SpamKiller filtered test mail containing the words human growth hormone, but it let through messages that had the acronym HGH. Fortunately, it's easy to create your own filters, specifying the field you want to filter (Message Text), as well as the conditions (contains HGH) and actions (Kill). As spammers find new ways to get past filters, McAfee creates new filters, which you can download to SpamKiller by clicking the Update button.
Some limitations
Overall, SpamKiller gets it right most of the time. In our tests, it let through slightly more unwanted mail than SpamCop did, but it tagged fewer legitimate messages as spam. SpamKiller identified and killed 20 messages; 3 were legitimate ones from mailing lists, but we quickly added them back to our in-box by clicking the Rescue button. It accepted 43 messages; 6 of which were pure spam, including one with a virus attachment. Unlike SpamCop, SpamKiller does not detect viruses, nor can it filter the text of MIME-encoded mail, messages sent via America Online, or those from Microsoft Network. A McAfee spokesperson says that the company plans to support these services in a future release, possibly before year's end.
Fight back
SpamKiller lets you enact revenge against lowly spammers by looking up the domain and e-mail addresses of a sender's ISP, then sending complaints to the ISP's abuse department--a much easier method than SpamCop's complex reporting process. You can also set SpamKiller to automatically reply with an error message, fooling the spammer into thinking your address isn't valid. It doesn't get any better than that.
The techno two-step
Unfortunately, SpamKiller's process still requires two steps: you must filter mail in SpamKiller, then download it to your e-mail client, which amounts to more work than necessary for low-spam in-boxes. But if your in-box houses more spam than legitimate messages, give this program a whirl.
Take me back to the roundup!
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48
User Rating: 
9/10
IT'A A WINNER!!!
Pros: Idon't know why it got so many bad reviews. It works very well and does a great job for me. Maybe the cry babies should read the help file. With a little reading I set up some filters and have had zero problems. As you use it it learns more of your ab
Cons: None
User Rating: 
1/10
K9 from keir.net free and infinitely superior
Pros: can't think of any
Cons: McAfee more concerned with selling products than support for a junk product.
User Rating: 
5/10
To Hell and back but still no spamkiller
Pros: Yes it does work, but be very! very! afraid!
Cons: This company makes the moster in the closet looking through the crack in the door seem like the light is always on so there is no monster in the closet. Did you follow that? If not you are ready for McAfee anything products. I purchased spam killer in th
User Rating: 1/10
Awful. Just awful.
Pros: None.
Cons: Conflicts with McAfee VirusScan. McAfee unable to support the program. Kills good mail and lets spam through. McAfee WILL NOT stop auto-renewal once they get your credit card number. POPfile is free and infinitely superior.
User Rating: 1/10
Does not integrate with outlook
Pros: captures mail before getting to your email client.
Cons: SpamKiller will not integrate with MS outlook unless you are in a corporate environment using MAPI connection. It will NOT work in most home environments.
User Rating: 
2/10
Good idea, bad execution
Pros: The product was easy to install and configure.
Cons: The Spam Killer server would crash every time I went to look at what messages were getting blocked. Had to reboot the system constantly and tried reinstalling to no avail. It ended up deleting a ton of my email off of the server which is gone for good. I
User Rating: 
8/10
The best of the non-outlook pgms
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 
3/10
waste of time program
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 1/10
Shame on You, Macaffee!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 
10/10
SpamKiller=GREAT...SecurityCen ter=CRAP
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 5/10
Friendly but poorly executed
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 2/10
Worse than the Spam!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 
4/10
can't get it to work w ms outlook express
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 2/10
Why did I buy it?
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 10/10
Great-- Works for Hotmail
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 4/10
Usual McAfee Piece of Crap
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 3/10
Eudora filters are better than this.
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 1/10
Spamkiller stinks
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 8/10
Rock Solid on Win 2000, works well.
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 4/10
Out of control!!!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 2/10
still unimpressed...
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 1/10
I bought this thing???
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 2/10
Doesn't work and doesn't let Outlook work!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 5/10
Annoying popups almost as bad as spam
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 
7/10
Mcafee adds its own spam
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 2/10
a big letdown!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 3/10
buggy frustrating software the looses your mail
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 7/10
A Great Program - If it Worked
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 2/10
Useless Software
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 
6/10
Great potential
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 1/10
Have to buy to evaluate!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 3/10
difficult to use
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 4/10
Just don't ask for support!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 10/10
McrapAfee Sucks
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 7/10
Does the job fine
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 4/10
What? No Hotmail
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 3/10
This product took my mail download time from 2 minutes to 1.5 hours
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 3/10
Mailwasher is easier and
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 6/10
Not as good as Spam Cop
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 9/10
Worth twice the price!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 10/10
Unable to download and function
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 7/10
This was a great program until McAfee bought it
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 9/10
NO MORE SPAM!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 9/10
Kills tons of spam
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 8/10
It's ABOUT TIME
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 10/10
Grat filter - Saves time
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 1/10
it doesn't stop spam, it deletes it after arrival!!!
Pros:
Cons:
User Rating: 7/10
Doesn't block AOL spam!
Pros:
Cons:
