Spam Chronicles

Agnitum is offering their Spam Terrier software for free. It’s for Microsoft mail clients - Outlook 2000 and up, Outlook Express 5.0, 5.5 and 6 and Vista Mail. The software is available for dowloading from here and they have a blog posting here.

I decided to download and try it out so I setup Outlook Express 6 on a Windows XP Home Edition PC (Actually a VM in Parallels but that shouldn’t matter).

The install language options are English, Russion, Dutch, Spanish and French. When the install started it noticed that Outlook Express 6 was open and told me to close it. The install was pretty straight foward. only needing to click through the screens. One interesting note in the license agreement was that the license was governed by the laws of Cyprus although Agnitum is a Russian company. I’m not sure what that means, if anything. Just found it interesting. Once the install itself finished the following screen appeared.

I provide my name, e-mail and leave the newsletters checked. (I’m curious to see how much e-mail they send.) This is where it got interesting, They were sending a license key via e-mail. A typical user would probably have only one PC and one e-mail client so I started Outlook Express and I got the following prompt:

In one window I have a screen telling me to paste in the license key. When I try to open my e-mail to get the key I get prompted again, Not a big deal, just annoying. Along with the license key are some e-mails asking for confirmation to the e-mail newsletters which is a good thing. Clicking a link is all that’s needed to confirm. I need to restart my mail client.

After restarting Outlook Express I get the following prompt:

Since this is an empty mailbox I don’t expect much from training but I tell it to do so immediately and get the following message:

I accept the defaults and click Next. I then asked to select only folder that contain ’spam” so I pick the spamn folder (which is empty) followed by a prompt to pick folders that contain only “not spam” messages.

So now we’re ready to go.

The first change I notice are new folders under the inbox:

And a new toolbar with these buttons:

How It Works

Spam Terrier uses a Bayesian filter to identify spam. It needs to be trained to be optimized. The best way to do this is to mark both spam and non-spam messages. So when it’s first being used it’s best to start marking both spam and non-spam even though the impulse is to just mark spam. Spam Terrier does provide the ability to scan entier directories which is a nice touch which avoids a lot of button clicking if you have a lot of mail already available.

The filter assigns a number to non-neutral words in the e-mail By default if the total is above 85 the message is marked as spam. If the total is 75-84 then it’s marked probable spam. These values are configurable.

There’s also the ability to create a whiletilst of e-mail addresses, ip addresses, domain names or keywords for mail that should always be considered good. Likewise there’s the ability to create a blacklist for messages to always be treated as spam.

There’s also these options for dealing with the spam messages:

I find the default to mark “probable spam” as read as strange, especially when actual spam is marked as unread. I would think either mark both as read so they can be ignored or mark spam as read and “probable spam” as unread so it can be checked. I change the settings to mark “spam” as read, “probable spam” as unread, to change the subject and to delete spam messages after 30 days.

The Bottom Line

Spam Terrier has a nice feature set , especially when considering that it’s free. But what really matters is how well it works. In this case it’s a bad thing that I don’t get any spam. Time to collect some spam.