Antispam

Antispam: although probably not the most exciting feature of a security suite, it is still one that serves a useful purpose (if it works correctly) and it is something you will be paying for if you purchase ESS.

How are people finding it? On the spam I recieve it seems to be working very effectively, even after a short period of use when it probably hasnt finished the 'learning' process, it is certainly working better than Mozilla's Thunderbird's
AntiJunk feature. I'm running Thunderbird and Outlook Express on the same mail accounts to test the effectiveness of ESS AntiSpam.

I have a few questions on it:

1. from reading the help file I understand that as well as the Bayesian filter it also relies on updates received in the same way as the anti-virus updates. Will these updates be shown on the Updates page of the web site too, either as a seperate entry or part of the anti-virus signatures, e.g. 'antispam updated'?

2. If spam emails are not being recognised as such, as well as marking them as spam to deal with them for me, should spam emails be submitted so any updates to the anti-spam module can be made (if necessary)?

3. finally, how is it working for others? i dont suppose i get anywhere near as much spam as others so how is it handling spam for those that are being heavily spammed?

thanks!

 

Although I don't have the numbers my strong impression is that the number of spam e-mails per day decreased significantly since I changed to ESS.

 

thanks rwt325
when i said it wasnt the most exciting part of a security suite......

still, this suite brings 2 new features: firewall and anti-spam, you WILL be paying for anti-spam whether you want it or will use it.

 

I'm not complaining about ESS's Anti-spam, I just have a technique that's prevented spam for years and hasn't really used anyone's product:

Create a "public" e-mail address and a "personal" e-mail address.
Public address is something like yyy@hotmail.com.
Used for anything you register, purchase, etc.
Never check it or interact with it unless you specifically must look to "confirm" something. If you had to look and must retain something from this mailbox... receipt? ...then forward it to your personal address.

Personal address is for family and friends.
Disable the Reply All button and create one rule:
Delete any message with "FW: FW" in the subject.

That said, this particular product still has a couple bugs that need to be worked out, but looks okay. Hard to tell if you don't get any spam in the first place. So, for me this piece of the product would be wasted money.

Still trying to decide on the firewall. (Here I use a hardware firewall, so anything that gets to me was by choice.) It's the outgoing cryptic messages that sometimes require research before answering Deny or Allow. This isn't ESS unique either, but is common to most firewalls.

The Antivirus protection is very fast and uses minimal resources. So far, it found one "trojan" within a .zip file and one "false positive" on adware. I call it false positive only in that I downloaded shareware from a trusted site and the advertisement is disabled when the program is registered. AV kept deleting the file during download and once turned off, kept flagging the file for deletion when I tried to install it. (Once I declare it safe from within the AV setup, the AV should ignore it.) Got to turn off the update balloon as it interferes with other programs.

Edited Post: Additional Comments
Just to be fair: The comments above are for a machine that has one user only. The evaluation is being conducted for both home use and business use. On a machine were the user cannot be trusted to practice safe measures at all times, this software is needed. In that regard, ESET's product is standing out above the competition.

 

Is there a way to see the statistical counter for the Antispam module? That way I could see how the filter is doing (false positives, spam caught, etc.)

 

I'm using outlook express and although i was glad to see the anti-spam feature included this time round i am finding it very intermittent and sometimes awfully slow to startup and process mail. I don't believe it's my system as I have a 64-bit chip on xp and 2gb ram also i have tried using it under heavy load and idle & found no difference.