SpamNet & Inbox Buddy
March 30, 2003
Continuing my love-hate relationship with Outlook XP, this week has brought a couple of nifty add-ons.
Inbox Buddy
First, the folks who bring us Feedster have a nifty little package called “Inbox Buddy”. Inbox Buddy analyzes your mailbox, asks you a few questions, and then categorizes and color-codes you mail from recipients into various categories ranging from friends to clients to family to spam. Even better, it can show you a view of your inbox based on priorities you’ve set for each of these. Spam, of course, is relegated to a holding folder until you review it.
The upside—it does a wonderful job on the categorization and prioritization of e-mail, and a fairly passable job of spam detection (far, far better than my previous tool, “Junk Spy”).
The downside—the analysis pass completely died on my Outlook, but as mentioned the other day, my Outlook environment is a little extreme. The spam filter also required a fair amount of tuning to quit eating “good” messages. Fortunately, this is a pretty easy task (highlight the message and hit the “reclassify” button on the toolbar).
For various reasons, I’ve had e-mail addresses on various web sites since 1994 or so. This means I get a ton of spam—at least 1,000 a day, gusting to 3,000+. I’d have been quite happy with the improvements in spam filtering with Inbox Buddy if I hadn’t discovered…
SpamNet
Cloudmark’s SpamNet is nothing short of amazing. Instead of being based on a periodically updated rule set plus your own additions and deletions, it uses a collaborative ruleset based on spam identified by all of the users of the program. Spamnet builds a signature for each message and compares it to the database—if it’s been identified as spam, it goes off to the holding folder. If it misses one, you hit the “block” button and the message is moved to your spam catch, plus the central database is updated (weighted based on how good or bad a job of reporting each user has been doing, so one person can’t arbitrarily decide that messages from “so and so” are spam). You can also “unblock” a mis-caught message the same way.
The net result appears to be a set of rules that is very up-to-date (very important, as spams change at an alarmingly fast rate). Over the course of a day, SpamNet appears to miss perhaps 5 - 7 messages for me (versus probably 50 - 60 for Junkspy), and even more importantly, has misidentified exactly ONE other message as spam.
This thing works so well it’s stunning.
Minor quibbles: I have a set of wav files that play when messages are routed via rules to two or three of my more critical folders. SpamNet filters after the messages arrive, so I’ll get the audible alert, bring up my mailbox and the folder will be empty… Which is certainly better than having spam in it, but of course, I want an egg in my beer too 
I’m also not clear how much network traffic this thing does. On a cable modem, the spam filtering happens very close to real-time; on a dial-up connection this might be a bit slower.
Best part—SpamNet is free. Yep. Free. If you’re an Outlook user (sorry, Outlook Express isn’t supported), run don’t walk to get a copy.
Inbox Buddy is $39.95, with a 30 day trial. Since I don’t need it’s spam filtering, I’m still deciding if the categorization is worth $40 to me, and it very well might be. If you’re going to use it for spam filtering, it’s a bargain, however.
| 2.8 |
Chuck Lawson · Filed Under 
Hi there,
I’m the guy who wrote Feedster and also Inbox Buddy. I just wanted to give you a few comments:
a) The list price of Inbox Buddy is indeed $39.95 but we’ve extended the introductory pricing of $29.95 thru June
b) Sorry about the problems that you had. We do have a 1.1 coming out this week or next which will probably help.
c) Thank you for the excellent analysis. I’m passing it on to our other engineers immediately.
d) Can we get examples of the good messages we though were spam? Your environment does sound extreme we’d love to meet the challenge.
Best and thank you for looking at our product.
Scott
Wow! A visitor—and a celebrity one at that
Thanks for your feedback, Scott!
The $29.95 is good news indeed, as I’m finding the categorization very useful.
After I rebooted this afternoon, when I restarted Outlook, lo and behold Buddy came up and did his interview; having weeded out a couple of thousand old messages from my inbox in the meantime might have helped that some
The majority of the messages inadvertently categorized as spam were yahoo groups messages; perhaps in an upcoming version you could add the ability (or perhaps it’s there and I didn’t find it) to just add a blanket rule like “leave alone anything from groups.yahoo.com”; even adding them one at a time it was difficult to make IB recognize messages cc:d to a mailing list (as opposed to direct to a list) as non-spam.
Anyway, that stuff is all still pretty small beer—with the exception noted in the article (which may not be everyone’s cup of tea), IB is far better than any spam-eater I’ve tried to-date, and that’s not even considering the auto categorization, which I think is REALLY useful and innovative. I’m not sure what you’ve got up your sleeve for future updates, but I’d sure love to see this feature extended—perhaps being tied into Outlook’s task and calendar system?
Thanks again for your comments, and for producing a great little package—I’m looking forward to seeing what all’s new in 1.1!
I have been using Spam Inspector to control spam for about three months now after being unsatisfied with spamnet. I am very pleased with Spam Inspector however. One of the nice things is that it is a plug-in to your email client. It can be used with Outlook, Outlook Express and AOL. There is only one other product I’m aware of for AOL. The price is reasonable and it catches about 95% of my spam.
http://www.spaminspector.com
In the past week (since I installed the last update, as I removed and replaced it), SpamNet has blocked 10,703 messages, and checked 16,526 messages.
I’ve hit the “block” button on spam messagess it missed 158 times.
My calculator suggets that is a success rate of 99.1%—which completely boggles my mind.
I’ve fished two messages that shouldn’t have gotten caught out of the Spam folder. On one of them, I wouldn’t bet that I didn’t accidently “double-hit” the block.
Since the price is free, at least currently, it’s a tough deal to beat.
Still no Outlook Express support (although they claim that’s coming soon), but if you run Outlook, SpamNet is about as close to a “no-brainer” as I’ve seen.
- Chuck
Personally i use Spamfighter.It´s more efficient than the other I have tried and it´s free.
http://www.spamfighter.com
BR Martin