Intego ’s Personal Antispam X4 ( 10.4.2 ) is one of a couple of prosperous - to - use spam utility that work within your e - mail app . I favor this feeler because it leaves all my e - mail in one emplacement where I can easy manage everything . I ’m nervous about a stand - alone spam filter by chance deleting or failing to forward mail that I want .
This programme back POP as well as IMAP calculate – though that support is limited to the Apple Mail ( ) and Microsoft Entourage ( ) due east - mail service client . It ’s also the most expensive spam utility program I ’ve tested and , unluckily , the disbursal does n’t stop with the initial leverage . Intego ask that you give a annual fee of $ 30 ( after the first twelvemonth ) to get monthly updates to its database of spammer URLs .
Personal Antispam uses a mixture of techniques for dribble your e - post , including a statistical learning filter , black- and whitelists ( it can mechanically add Address Book touch to the whitelist ) , and attachment filtering ( the programme filters .bat , .cpl , .pif , and .scr attachments by nonremittal , and you could add attachment type if you like ) . It will also mark off as spam those messages send from URLs identify as being assort with spammer , as well as those with sure language encodings . you could disable any of these filter by deselecting the appropriate checkboxes in Personal Antispam ’s main window . That same window issue a statistical legal community graph that details the number of junk e-mail messages you ’ve received over a menses of 30 days , 7 days , or 24 hours .
Setup is largely a snap . When you found the program for the first prison term , Personal Antispam asks whether you ’d like to habituate it with Mail or Entourage or both . Its setup assistant does all the work necessary to get the usefulness to function with Mail . To instal the program for use with suite , you must adjust Entourage ’s Junk Mail context and create a ruler . All this is explain in the manual . Once it ’s installed , you resume your Mac , read the covering , and launch it to configure a few alternative .
For example , you need to tell it if you want to automatically percolate einsteinium - post with Asian or Cyrillic encodings , specifically filter mail with Nipponese encodings , or moot any due east - post whose dependent line lead off with ADV to be spam .
The programme adds a menu particular to your e - ring armour guest that you use to pronounce messages either as good or as junk e-mail . you could educate Personal Antispam with archives of junk e-mail and good mail just as you could with SpamSieve 2.5 ( ) , which also works within your e - post programme . Just select any messages in Mail or Entourage , opt Antispam ’s Learn Spam command , and it will do what you ask .
Once you ’ve installed the program , just download your eastward - postal service and Personal Antispam will channel content it believes to be junk e-mail into a Spam folder . Out of the box , it ’s anything but accurate , as its statistical encyclopedism filter has nothing to establish its decision on . While it ’s learning , it incline to let spam through rather than sternly shifting good e - mail into the Spam folder .
The programme value any host configurations you ’ve configure for your e - mail accounts – mean that messages are edit only when you ’ve enjoin your e - mail node to do so . And once you ’ve trained the political platform , you could export its options and share them with other Personal Antispam user – thus expurgate the clock time it takes them to train the program .
Macworld’s buying advice
Intego ’s Personal Antispam X4 ( 10.4.2 ) provide ease of use and safety machine thanks to its build - in nature , and it ’s also configurable enough that you could create complex rules for its black- and whitelists . While its suspect - uniform resource locator database is a big feature , it ’s regrettable that you have to pay an annual subscription fee to keep it up to escort . The plan ’s price , that annual subscription fee , and the fact that it only sour with two Es - mail clients prevents Personal Antispam from receiving my high congratulations .
[ Christopher Breen is a senior editor atMacworld . ]
[ EDITOR ’S NOTE : April 12 , 2007 – This revue was amended to mull over the fact that Personal Antispam X4 can be trained at once with archives of spam and honorable email . ]
