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Anti-Spam Software for Mom? 106

Posted by Cliff from the software-for-the-rest-of-your-family dept.
daemondev asks: "As a software engineer and FreeBSD user, I've had no problem setting up and using the early anti-spam solutions like Spam-Assassin, TMDA and PopFile. I'm reasonably happy with where I am today, but it certainly could still be better! On the other hand, these solutions are not at all appropriate for my mom, who now has a huge spam problem (she really doesn't need all of that Viagra). I'm looking for something that works "out of the box" and doesn't require a lot of in depth knowledge about email and text filters, and which ideally doesn't need to be updated and replaced continuously. She uses Outlook 2000 on Windows ME. Has anyone found a good package that they would trust to stop spam but that's easy enough for their mom to use?"
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Anti-Spam Software for Mom? More

Anti-Spam Software for Mom?

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  • 2 are ok (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mozilla mail

    Mail for OS X seems good also.

    I know that doesn't answer your question... does she right click and add to junk email senders list? Not real effective anymore, but it will get a few of them.

    Is she using POP3 or IMAP?

  • Do it yourself (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zach Garner ( 74342 )
    If you are running that FreeBSD system as a server, you could run a fetchmail to get her mail off of her ISP's server, filter it, and let her then retrieve the filtered mail from your server. That may or may not be a lot of work, depending on your setup.

    • Re:Do it yourself (Score:2, Interesting)

      by trentfoley ( 226635 )
      My parents had to change isp and email addresses due to a move. This pissed off my Dad. Well, I decided to help. I've got dsl with a static ip, so, I bought them a domain ($9 at godaddy), created an mx record at zoneedit (free), and configured my mail server to accept their domain.

      My parents don't even know that I'm using spamassassin et al on my mail server. Also, they never have to worry about changing email addresses again, assuming the .com tld stays in business.

      After about a year of running this,

  • CloudMark's SpamNet (Score:5, Informative)

    by LaRIC ( 6856 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @08:46AM (#5997821)
    Cloudmakr produces SpamNet. It works great for me. I get between 300-400 spam per day and it removes about 95% of those. you can find the product on http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/
    • How much does it cost? The price seems to be hidden on their site.

      I would bet that SpamAssassin would be useable as an Outlook module already if it weren't for the parent company being for profit.

      • Re:CloudMark's SpamNet (Score:4, Interesting)

        by icemax ( 565022 ) <matthew_d_stone.hotmail@com> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:03AM (#5997890) Homepage
        One little problem, CloudMark SpamNet has alienated the entire community it is based on. For 11 months, it was touted as totaly free community-based spam detection (using p2p bayesian filtering AFAIK), while the end-users beta-tested it. Now, as they reached their 1.0 release, a decision was made to charge $3.99/month for the "service" (which the community created by classifying mail as spam w/ their client). Read more on it here [com.com]

        • Re:CloudMark's SpamNet (Score:4, Funny)

          by MarkGriz ( 520778 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:38AM (#5998070)
          Frankly, if they didn't see that coming, they were asleep at the wheel. Sure it's free while it's in beta. Hell, even Microsoft gives away free beta software.

          Did they really think CloudMark was going to continue to offer the service for free? You can't pay your bandwidth bills with spam (unless you are a spammer). Hey, perhaps they should offer a free, advertisement-supported spam filtering service :-)
          • The point is, during the beta period, the beta-testers were promised the use of the service for free, for ever. Also, most of the functionality of the system is derived from the spam filter, which is derived from the work of these beta testers. Without community support, their spam filter == useless IMHO
            • well...I beta tested it...and I have never been told otherwise that it would be taken away and it still goes, it works wonders for me and they have a 30 day trial and $3 isnt that much to stop spam if you get large amounts
        • Heh when my beta failed I downloaded the final version. Started the installer but canceled. I think it somehow magically unlocked my beta, I haven't paid anything but it still works. Guess I'll see in about 20 days if that's really the case.

      • Re:CloudMark's SpamNet (Score:5, Informative)

        by FrenZon ( 65408 ) * on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:16AM (#5997954) Homepage
        There is spamassassin for outlook, available here [sourceforge.net]

        Personally, I'm using a combination of SpamBayes [spambayes.org] and the aforementioned cloudmark, although once my 30 free days runs out, I'll just be using spambayes, which seems much more accurate.

        • I just ditched Cloudmark Spamnet and replaced it with SpamBayes, and I'm not looking back. SpamBayes is working as well as Spamnet ever did!

          The initial setup of SpamBayes was slightly more involved than Spamnet's, but once you get past that initial step, SpamBayes is a no-brainer to use.
    • Its called CloudMark, and here is a link: Download SpamNet [cloudmark.com]

      This program is great, you can mark new spam, and its added to their spam database to be filtered for everyone else. It auto-updates when you load outlook, and is very un-obtrusive. It simply moves spam to a 'Spam' folder in outlook, which you can clear whenever you want. Very reccomended, I like it! :)
    • I've used Spamnet since its early days (9 or so months now).

      While it used to work great - and certainly a no-brainer to install and configure - its effectiveness in the past few weeks (since they announced that they were going to charge) has decreased dramatically - so much so that I am looking for another solution as SpamNet just doesn;t cut it anymore.

      For those who don't know, what they have done is allow us beta testers to con tinue to use the last beta version, and are only charging new users and tho
      • I can only say don;t use Spamnet at the moment. Hopefully it will improve, ..

        Of course, if the problem is due to fewer people using it, this will just make it worse.
  • This is something I've been trying to investigate myself, without much success. We (that is, me and my father, from whom I inherit my geekiness) have tried an older version of SpamAssassin in the past, but she seemed to have a problem with false positives with it (or at least she was extremely worried about them; I dunno if any actually happened), so it got rejected.

    I've been strongly considering trying the new version with the Bayesian filtering capabilities, but this brings to mind two issues - 1) we don

    • Re:Wish I knew... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cymen ( 8178 ) <cymenvig.gmail@com> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:06AM (#5997898) Homepage
      I upgraded to the Bayesian version of SpamAssassin as part of my regular maintenance. I didn't train it at all. It works great. If false positives are such a problem why not lower the bar on what gets into your inbox? I just save all my spam to a Spam folder and check it every once in a while (using IMAP). This works great for me and I can catch the occasional false positive. I've had maybe one or two in the last year and neither of them was particularly important emails. They were short notes that got flagged.

      This in combination with the Mozilla mail client's Bayesian filter, which is easy to train, works wonderful. It would be cool to have Mozilla's Bayesian filter share its input with SpamAssassin.

  • Spam Inspector (Score:3, Informative)

    by Komarosu ( 538875 ) <[nik_doof] [at] [nikdoof.net]> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @08:51AM (#5997846) Homepage
    http://www.giantcompany.com/ ...i use it at home, intergrates nice with Outlook 2000 and nice and easy to use (click "Is Spam" and "Isn't Spam") but it filters a good 90% of my spam without intervention. Its had only 2 miss fires but a quick click on "Isnt Spam" and its all fixed.
  • Cloudmark's Spamnet is an extremely good application for this.

    http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/ [cloudmark.com]
    • At $4.99 per month. It was cool when it was free and the plan was to charge corporate users. But what they did was build up their corpus of spam and then start charging. Clever, but not a strategy or price point I'm interested in supporting.
      • According to CNET news.com.com.com.com [com.com], it's only $3.99/month and $1.99/month to the people that helped test and develop it. While charging for a service people though was going to be free might not be ideal, come on now - it's 2 bucks a month. Pride for a job well done and good intentions don't pay the bills nor make investors happy. If you don't want to pay for the service, find another comparable solution (or get a job).
        • If you don't want to pay for the service, find another comparable solution

          I did. I'm using client-side filtering.

          (or get a job).

          That was neither necessary nor applicable. I didn't propose to take their service without paying; I just said I wasn't interested.

  • Here's one (Score:5, Informative)

    by Frequanaut ( 135988 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:01AM (#5997882)
    The Mozilla mail client (thunderbird).

    After training it for about a week, I don't think I've had one false positive, and *very* few missed.

    Plus the added benefit of it being less of a security risk for her as well.
    • The Mozilla mail client (thunderbird). After training it for about a week, I don't think I've had one false positive, and *very* few missed.

      I use Mozilla's mail client with spam filtering enabled too - the problem is that it relies too heavily on the user's correct classification of all incoming messages. If you fail to correct a false positive, it will lead to more false positives. I typically get 1 false positive every other day or so, and about 50% of the time they are relatively important messages.
      • Now I can't claim to have experimented much with Mozilla's implementation of the bayes stuff, but I've been using Popfile for a while and let me just propose that if you're getting a false positive every other day, then at some point you must have (well, may have) classified a real message as spam. I saw that happen to me once. So I reviewed as much of my corpus as possible and found the offender. I reclassified it and viola haven't had a false positive since! And that's with hundreds of messages a day.

  • Popfile... (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    get it at SourceForge. You can set it up for her once (install winperl, etc), feed the corpus of email she's (hopefully) saved, and then the rest of the interface is - not commandline, but web based - 127.0.0.1. I get no spam anymore. 'Course, my ESP (email service prov) is pretty unknown ... get her away from yahoo, aol, attbi/comcast, etc - get a domain!

  • Use an ISP that has server-side spam detection (Score:3, Informative)

    by timur ( 2029 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:07AM (#5997905)
    I recommend Dreamhost [dreamhost.com]. They use Razor, and you can have detected spam automatically deleted if you use IMAP. If you want POP3, then you'll need to create one filter on her email client, but that's something that you can do once and then forget about.
  • Spambayes works great for me and my users. You have to install Python but it's all very trivial (our users do it theirselves).

    http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
  • I have my mom using McAfee's Spamkiller. (www.mcafee.com) The learning curve isn't too steep (Mom got the hang of it almost immediately) and it is remarkably effective. The first time she launched it, the default filters correctly identified 36 out of 42 messages as spam. She occasionally asks me for help with particularly pernicious spammers, and I use those opportunities to educate her on creating more effective filters. Last time I checked, Spamkiller was knocking down 98% of her spam.

  • Spambayes (Score:3, Informative)

    by ggeens ( 53767 ) <ggeens AT iggyland DOT com> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:09AM (#5997919) Homepage Journal

    Spambayes [sourceforge.net] was mentioned a few months ago in . [linuxjournal.com]

    It supports Windows, and has a plugin for Outlook. Besides the plugin, there is a web interface that is accessible from any browser.

    Setting it up seems a bit difficult, but after that it should be mom-friendly.

  • Popfile (Score:4, Informative)

    by spu ( 591506 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:10AM (#5997923)
    I use Popfile [sourceforge.net] It's a Bayesean filter that is configured with an HTML interface. Very easy to use, and fairly accurate.

    • Re:Popfile (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mrpull ( 112590 )
      I've been using Outclass [vargonsoft.com] for a couple weeks and I'm pretty pleased. Outclass is a GPL'ed Outlook plugin that sits atop Popfile and eliminates the need to use the web interface to train the filters.

      It's not "mom-easy" to set up, but once it's up and going, she'll have no problem.

      mr.

  • Check out the SpamBayes Outlook Addin [python.net]. It's free, and based on the open source SpamBayes Project [sourceforge.net]

    I just read about this in Infoworld so I haven't had a chance to evaluate it, but they gave it rather high marks.

  • Spammunition. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Greyjack ( 24290 )
    Spammunition [upserve.com]. It's free.

  • Act as a mail relay for your Mom (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Isao ( 153092 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:25AM (#5998011)
    This might work for you. Since you're fighting spam for yourself, create a mailbox for your Mom on your smtp server, and configure her client to go to you for POP or IMAP mail.

    That way you simply administer anti-spam tools for her and yourself in a single step.

    This may have the added bonus of a common family domain, and of course it extends to siblings, etc.

    Before you do it, be sure you want to take on the responsibility of mail system management for your family. Frankly, since it's your mail too, it's likely less work than remotely administering several installations of client-side anti-spam tools.

  • Prevention is the best cure (Score:4, Informative)

    by Bishop923 ( 109840 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @09:37AM (#5998062)
    Your best bet is to ditch the old email address and get a new one, then teach her the fundamental tenets of spam avoidance...

    1) NEVER give out your email address to someone you don't know. (This includes posting on forums and sites that "require" you to register with a valid email address.)

    2) Even if you think you are giving your address to a trusted source, read that Privacy Policy. Look for something like: "we do not share user data with our associates". If the policy is hard to find or isn't there, don't trust them.

    3) NEVER click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

    4) For those cases where you need to sign up with a non-trusted source to get information, setup an account purely for retrieving passwords and registration confirmation.

    Ignorance, as is the case with pretty much everything, is the biggest problem that is easy to solve. Don't think just because she's "Mom" she can't learn these tips. My parents and grandparents both had a really bad spam problem, and by just showing them how to avoid getting spam in the first place goes far in reducing the over-all problem. (Especially when you can get them to spread the word to their friends and co-workers.)
    • > 3) NEVER click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

      If you don't unsubscribe, you can't complain when you get mailed. Any legitimate companies that do mailings will never mail you after you unsubscribe. Companies don't want to mail people that don't want to be mailed and will complain. They want to mail people that will buy their products.
      • But unsubscribing will confirm that the mailaddress is still in use, and thus is worth money when they sell it...
        • But unsubscribing will confirm that the mailaddress is still in use, and thus is worth money when they sell it...

          No one with any sense buys a remove list. No one wants to mail a remove list. That's just idiotic.
          • No one with any sense buys a remove list. No one wants to mail a remove list. That's just idiotic. Are you dreaming? Remove lists are precisely what spammers want to mail to, since it means the spam is reaching a real person. Why do you think spammers work so hard to bypass spam filters?
      • Spammers are the scum of the net.

        If you ever give them the notion that you read their junk-mail, they will laugh at your naiveness and bloat you mail box with junk.

        I *never* click anywhere in a message, I don't even allow html mail to get images (ads) from the net.

        All sites that ask to register a password via mail end up in an overbloated yahoo account that I use just for that pourpose. Why would anyone ask for my mail if not to junk it?

        After 5.5 years, my mail account still gets about 1 spam on a bad d
      • you can't complain

        Can. Will. Am.

    • Just a note on 1. It's not a panacea. You always get that one dork who decides to cc you on a forum post or something silly. But it does slow it down dramatically.
    • I have two email addresses: One through hotmail, and one through my isp. I do all online purchasing, email lists and what not with the hotmail account. I use the ISP account for personal correspondance with family and friends, and I put it on my business cards. (I instruct people ~not~ to directly send me e-cards, rather just paste the link in an email they personally send)

      In order to make the Hotmail account even usable (I've had it since waaaaaaaay before hotmail went M$), I have a safelist set up. Whe

    • In addition to the aforementioned sensible ideas: if you really want to punish the evil bastards and you own your own domain, the guy who runs my ISP taught me a great trick:

      Whenever you need to sign up for something that requires actual interactivity (i.e. reading the e-mail they send you and doing something with it), simply use the name of that site as the username on the e-mail account.

      For example: I own zenarchery.com. If I signed up for a Yahoo! account, I would give them the address yahoo@zenarchery
    • I would love to follow your advice no. 4, but had no luck finding a free account that would let me get mail by pop3 instead of web-interface. Any suggestions?
    • 1) NEVER give out your email address to someone you don't know. (This includes posting on forums and sites that "require" you to register with a valid email address.)

      This is VERY true. I had an email on my own domain, and as i sometimes, quite stupidly I might add, used it for registering to stuff, I got more and more spam. What did I expect, right. Anyway, I removed that email and made a new, different one, several weeks ago. Absolutely no spam on that email.

  • Thunderbird [mozilla.org]has a built-in autolearning spam filter. You just recieve your e-mail and when you see spam, mark it as such (by clicking the little 'Trash' Icon). And it is sent to the Junk folder and any future e-mail with similar structure will be blocked. As you mark e-mail as junk (or not junk) it learns and adapts. I have an almost 0% false-positive rate, and at least 95% catching rate. It uses the Bayesian algorythm [paulgraham.com].
  • Spampal [spampal.org.uk] is great (and free)! I use it with Outlook 2000. Spampal is a POP proxy. You install it as a service on your mom's computer and direct outlook to get the mail from it (ie localhost). Spampal then fetches the the mail from the real pop mailbox and tags all spam based on block lists. You the create an outlook mail folder called spam or something and make a rule that all mails with the header "X-spam-pal..." should be sent there.

    /jeorgen

    • I've just installed this filter. It doesn't bounce emails like Mailwasher but apart from that it seems to work pretty well. I'll let you all know how I get on. I'm using it with Norton Antivirus 2001 as well so I'm covering myself because Spam Pal downloads the emails whilst Mailwasher can delete stuff at the ISP's server prior to downloading to my PC. Only a Windows version exists.
  • what about a pop proxy ? you set up spamassassin, and others tools of auto detection you may need, and point outlook to the pop proxy. (on the same box, or more easily on your fbsd gateway)

    then you can tag or trash. tagging implies playing with outlook filters.

    .com site [bloomba.com]

    sf repo [sourceforge.net]

    also have a look at spamassasin for windows, the plug and play way [taint.org]

  • I run the email and web server that my parents use for their email account. It's a linux box that I run spam assassin on to kill spam. They both use Outlook 2000 as their IMAP client and I even set up webmail access for when they're away from their computer.
  • The OS X mail client has a built in spam filter. From apple's website (page here [apple.com]):

    It comes with sophisticated built-in junk mail filtering that uses adaptive latent semantic analysis to identify and nail junk mail messages and simple controls you need to train it to agree with your view of what's junk and what's not -- like the Junk button in the Toolbar that lets you so label any messages you choose, and the Not Junk override that appears on any message either you or the built-in filter labeled. When you'

  • CloudMark SpamNet.

    $1.99 / month.
  • You might like to try MailWasher [mailwasher.net]. It's free (although there's a Pro version too).
    • Big ups for this one....

      I'm now a longtime MailWasher user and it's fantastic. What I like most about it is that it itself is a lightning-fast POP3 client, so it acts as a pre-filter of sorts....it will login to your pop account, download the headers (or the whole message if you want), use its nifty spamfighting tools, and mark spam as spam. You then click "Process Mail" and it nukes and bounces everything, leaving your Outlook inbox fresh and clean to download only the good stuff.

      I originally found Mai

  • Use sneakemail (Score:3, Informative)

    by Stalemate ( 105992 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @11:21AM (#5998738)
    Sneakemail [sneakemail.com] and teach her to never give out her real email address to anyone. Just set up a new sneakemail address for whoever needs her address and give them that one. I have been using this for about 6 months since I got a new email address, and I still get no spam at all.

    The thing that really makes it cool for me is every email you get is forwarded to your real address through sneakemail, but sneakemail puts a label on it that you enter for each address you create. So, if you start getting spam from a certain address, just got to sneakemail and delete it.

    Heck, my mom doesn't even know my real address anymore.
    • What about mailing lists ? I use this method of creating a new email for every time you need one to give away, but mailing lists reject your messages if you do not post with the email you subscribed with. And they often have web archive, making youre real email very visible...
      • Well, I'm not sure about them rejecting your messages. I can't say that I've ever been on a mailing list that gave me a problem with this. I think I've been on two mailing lists since I started using sneakemail and didn't have this problem with either.

        As far as your real email being visible in a web archive, I don't even send email with my real address in the Reply To. I have a sneakemail address set up labeled Reply To and anyone that replies to one of my emails gets filtered through that. As far as I kno

  • Yahoo! Mail (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PoiBoy ( 525770 ) *
    No, seriously. Does she have a Yahoo email address, or is she willing to get a new email address from Yahoo?

    They have a spam filtering algorithm, and it does work rather effectively. I'm not sure what they charger per month, but they do offer POP service; using Outlook won't be a problem.

    I use their domain hosting service, and I very rarely get spam mail. At least 99% of it is quarantined in a folder that I might check once a month or just allow to get purged automatically.

  • I had to do this for my mom, and I just used a very simple whitelist technique. It works well for her because there is only a fixed subset of people that she corresponds with (the family) and they are all in her address book.

    Both Outlook Express and the full Outlook have a "Rules" system that let you automatically move emails around based on various criteria.

    Simply set her up some rules that match on the various types of email she wants to get. In my mom's case we have a family mailing list, which I set a rule to match the subject line for. She also gets automated emails from a cooking site, and from her ISP, so I set up rules for that.

    The key is each rule should simply match a type of mail she wants to keep, and have the "Stop processing rules" option checked. As soon as one of the criteria is matched, the rules stop and the mail stays in her inbox. The rule need not have any actual "action" on it, its purpose is to match and stop.

    The last two rules are critical. The next to last rule should be a "Match on FROM address", and you should select EVERYONE in her address book. (And of course, set the "stop processing more rules" bit). You may have to update this rule as she adds to her address book.

    The very last rule is the key. This one is only going to be processed if NONE of the others match. You simply have this rule match everything, and dump everything into a folder named "Junk Mail".

    That's it. No extra software required. When I go visit her, she usually has a ton of stuff in Junk Mail, just give it a quick look to make sure there is nothing your rules are missing, and dump it for her.

    P.S. If that's not geeky enough for you, I also recommend Cloudmark.

  • Check out Qurb [qurb.com]. It's a whitelist-based spam filter for Outlook, and I've been using it for a couple of months with no problems. Very simple to install, setup and use.
  • Spamassasin proxy for windows [bloomba.com] which requires minimal setup and works very well for me. I was using Cloudmark's solution, but stopped when they wanted $4.99 monthly to let me keep their database up-to-date. Found their solution flawed anyway, since a lot of people seemed to believe that mailing lists they subscribed to became spam when they grew tired with them.
  • Is there any bayesian filter that works with Outlook Express? This is what my family uses, and I know that SpamBayes only works with Outlook. I don't think I want them to switch to Mozilla.
    • Unlikely. Microsoft doesn't provide any (documented) hooks into Outlook Express except Simple MAPI, which isn't quite sophisticated enough to do a nice interface. (You can't get new mail notifications, you can't move messages between folders, and if you delete a message, it's gone forever. Also, scanning large inboxes with Simple MAPI is really slow.)
    • I use popfile [sourceforge.net] with Outlook Express. It doesn't strictly integrate with OE, but OE connects to popfile, and popfile prefixes the subject line of the email with [junk]. Then you make a rule in OE to move messages with [junk] in the subject to a junk folder.
  • http://www.messagefire.com

    It's not a free service, but it's really cheap, and it's got a nice user interface, designed specifically for your mom. You do have to check for false positives, because it's not perfect, but I get close to zero spam through my personal email account now that I'm using it. I wish I could use it at work.
  • Check out Eudora Pro [eudora.com] and the plugin Spamnix [spamnix.com]. Both are free to use, but if you register you don't get adware or annoyances.
  • although it doesn't provide free pop3 access, Yahoo mail blocks ALL of my spam.
    • I've got Yahoo, and my spam situation is pretty good, but some of the tricky spam still gets through. And I do report the spam when I get it, too.

      But yeah, certainly better than the spam I get in my Microsoft Ho'mail account.

  • Mailwasher (Score:2, Informative)

    by stuckatwork ( 622157 )
    I use Mailwasher [mailwasher.net] There is both a free version and a $29.95 pro version.

    Not quite an outlook integrated product, but the learning curve is easy.

    One of the nice features is that the mail is checked while still on the server, so the traffic is reduced a bit.

    It's got a few nice features. The latest incarnation of the freeware version is limited to one account,and does not include Hotmail access, but older versions did not have these limitations.

  • Outclass and Popfile (Score:2, Informative)

    by rheimbuch ( 674723 )

    Outclass [vargonsoft.com] is a free Outlook plugin for Popfile. It has a nice easy interface that exposes most of the functionality of popfile. Outclass directly integrates with Popfile, instead of using it as a proxy, allowing Outclass to filter any email account that Outlook supports. That includes IMAP and Exchange accounts.

    IMHO, it's a definiate must-have if you use outlook.

  • I find that spamassassin's approach works really well and run it at home on Win32 following the instructions here [openhandhome.com].

    If she's using POP3 to download her mail I can heartily recommend SAProxy [bloomba.com] which encapsulates Spamassassin as a POP3 proxy with a nice Windows installer & configuration screens.

    I have not used this one but have heard great things about it: spambayes [sourceforge.net], a Python based Bayeian classifier with nice plugin for Outlook 2000/XP [python.net].

    Last but not least, since Mcaffee bought Deersoft you can expect that

  • Apple's Mail.app does a good job with it's Junk mail tool. I've used it for a month and a half or so.

    Now, I'm back on a PC and want a Mac again, too bad I have to save up so many pennies for one.
  • I've been using Mcafee Spamkiller for months now and I recommend it. The retail price is about $40, but I got it at Costco for $16 with a $10 rebate, so I'm happy with the price. I think my mom could use it.
  • I use bogofilter with procmail and uw-imap. In the last month it's had zero false positives and only let one actual spam into my INBOX. Those numbers are a pretty typical month; I've never had a false positive (I still scan all my spam once it's sorted because I'm paranoid. I'll quit eventually). I initially trained it with about 1000 spam messages and 200 or so good ones.

    Mom can't set it up initially, and it needs to be implemented on the server, which might rule it out in your situation depending on who

  • Fetches mail from your POP server, removes the spam, let's you pickup the rest. Gives you a summary of what was filtered out. No voting. No software on your PC/Mac/*ix box. No content filters. Aimed at being usable by your relatives--not just techies.

    http://www.messagefire.com/ [messagefire.com], you can use the "Trial" link to test it against the first 20 messages in your inbox.

    Obligatory bias notice--I'm a partner in the company.

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