Specifications

PC MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 16, 2003 www.pcmag.com
46
BY CADE METZ
T
here’s more than one
way to skin a spammer.
To spot spam, Audio-
trieve’s InBoxer for Outlook en-
lists some of the same language
recognition technologies that
the company has used to filter
information from audio and
video streams. InBoxer isn’t a
cure-all, but it joins a short list
of personal software packages
that can filter most spam from
your in-box with only a mod-
icum of hassle.
Much like the Ella filtering
utility from Open Field Soft-
ware, which we recently tested
(“E-Mail Spring Cleaning,” July
2003), InBoxer integrates with
Microsoft Outlook; you can’t
use the app with any other e-
mail client. But if you’re one of
the millions who run Outlook,
you’ll find the tool much
easier to use than standalone
apps like DigiPortal’s Choice-
Mail One or NextGen’s Good-
byeSpam.
InBoxer installs in minutes.
Upon installation, it adds two
new folders to your Outlook
menu: InBoxer Blocked and In-
Boxer Review. Then, using the
same mathematical models
built into Audiotrieve’s audio
and video products, the app
sifts through your in-box. Mes-
sages deemed spam are shut-
tled into the Blocked folder.
Messages that, according to cal-
culations, fall into the gray area
between spam and legitimate
mail are placed in the Review
folder.
Considering that InBoxer
goes through this initial process
with absolutely no training, we
found the outcome reasonably
impressive. Before we tested
the product at
PC Magazine
Labs, our in-box contained 200
legitimate messages and 100
pieces of spam. InBoxer cor-
rectly sorted 21 spam messages
into the Blocked folder, and 18
of the 24 messages it placed in
the Review folder were also
spam.
Of course, that means that 61
spam messages were left in our
in-box. But the utility learns
your mail as you use it more.
At installation, InBoxer also
adds a pair of buttons to your
Outlook toolbar: Block and
Keep. Using these buttons, you
can periodically parse through
your mail and identify what sort
of messages should be blocked
and what should be kept. As you
do so, the app adjusts its filters
accordingly.
Initially, you’ll have to look
through your Blocked and Re-
view folders as well as your
in-box. Eventually, you’ll check
through the Review folder occa-
sionally, looking for important
mail that may have slipped
through the filter. After a few
days of training, InBoxer caught
BY LARRY J. SELTZER
S
ome e-mail services pro-
vide spam filtering, but
perhaps the better ap-
proach is a spam-filtering ser-
vice that also gives you an e-mail
account. For $15.99 for six
months, AlienCamel gives you a
spam-filtered
POP3 or IMAP
mail account. And we found that
AlienCamel’s innovative, pro-
prietary approach to spam fil-
tering works fairly well.
At the core of the service are
server-based whitelists and black-
lists. Mail from users on your
whitelist goes straight to your in-
box. Mail from users on your
blacklist goes to the Spam folder.
Mail from other users is stored in
a Pending folder, and you are noti-
fied by an e-mail (called the Pend-
ing Messages Advisory) that con-
tains a list of those senders and the
subject lines of the
pending mail.
The Advisory is not
just a message but an
HTML form in which
AlienCamel classifies
each e-mail either as
probably spam or
probably not spam,
using two different
spam-filtering algo-
rithms. For each
pending message, you
can whitelist the
sender and accept the
mail, blacklist the
sender and send the
mail to the spam fold-
er, retrieve the mail
without whitelisting, or reject the
message without blacklisting.
We set up an
IMAP account
and used AlienCamel for almost
a month. By the end, we were
still seeing some spam listed as
probably legitimate mail, but we
hadn’t seen a real message clas-
sified as spam in weeks.
We like that the Pending Mes-
sages Advisory interface let us
filter spam without having to
look at the actual messages, but
sometimes the sender name and
subject line can be ambiguous
indicators of whether a message
is spam. And there is no way to
preview the message except by
opening the Pending folder in
your mail client.
The other problem, which
may be a deal breaker for some
users, is that AlienCamel works
only with
POP3 and IMAP soft-
ware. If you want to use
AOL or
Web-based mail, you’re out of
luck. But since you can read
POP3 mail into an AlienCamel
account, you can continue to use
an existing
POP
3 account.
AlienCamel 1.0
Direct price: $15.99 for six months.
Alien Camel Pty. Ltd., 650-353-4729,
www.aliencamel.com.
lllmm
Do-It-Yourself Spam Fighting
about 90 percent of incoming
spam, with just a handful of
what we deemed as legitimate
mail winding up in the Review
folder. InBoxer also includes a
blacklist and a whitelist, plus
several advanced tools for ad-
justing filters by hand.
The only trouble with InBox-
er is that it’s not quite as slick as
Ella. Audiotrieve confuses mat-
ters by installing two Quaran-
tine folders instead of one. But
InBoxer is easier to use than
many other personal antispam
utilities, and it can certainly ease
your spam problem.
InBoxer for Outlook
Direct price: $24.95. Requires: Micro-
soft Outlook 2000or later. Audiotrieve
LLC, 617-499-7700, www.audiotrieve
.com.
lllmm
If It Sounds like Spam...
FIRST LOOKS
AlienCamel’s Pending Messages
Advisory e-mail lets you decide
whether mail from unknown senders
is spam or legit.
InBoxer
automati-
cally creates
Review and
Blocked
folders.
It learns as
it goes to
help you
sort your
Outlook
in-box.