Best free anti spam software

Martin Brinkmann
Nov 7, 2005
Updated • Mar 14, 2014
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I have been using Spamihilator for the last two years and can only say that this is the best free anti spam software that I have ever used. And believe me, I tried a lot. Before i used the software I received approximately 500 spam mails per day, mainly due to published emails on websites that I own.

I searched desperately for a good anti spam software and tried many. Many that I tried did not reduce the spam count enough to justify their use, others caused lots of false positives which flagged legitimate emails as spam.

Then, finally after a long evaluation period I found the spam software that I'm still using today. It reduced my daily spam amount from 500 to 4 in just two days.

Spamihilator "sits" between your mail client and the email server, and analyzes every single email that flows through it.

If the program believes that a mail is spam, it moves it to the trashcan and the training area.The training area is important, as you use it to teach the program to make it better.

It is highly suggested to use the training area for at least the first work of operating Spamihilator to make sure that no legitimate emails land in the trashcan folder. You can also add email addresses to a whitelist so that they will never be flagged as spam regardless of contents. This can be useful to make 100% sure that mails from select recipients arrive in your inbox and are not interrupted by the spam checker.

spamihilator

If there is a whitelist there's also a blacklist, you can add emails to the blacklist so that they are always flagged as spam and moved to the trash automatically as a consequence.

The training area helps to increase distinguishing chance of the spam software, you can select every mail and define it as spam or not. The program learns from your actions here and will improve its spam detecting algorithm further based on that.

The amount of spam mails I received remained steady the same, but the amount that arrived at my mailbox was reduced by an astonishing 98% after just two days of using the spam program.

Spamihilator already has some good spam checking algorithm which gets better by using the training area but there are also lots of plugins which mostly serve a special spam type. Lets take a look at some of the most important plugins.

  • Addressee Filter: Quickly filters out mails that are not addressed To or Cc'd to one of your correct email addresses.
  • AlphabetSoup Filter 1.0: This plugin filters emails containing useless chains of characters.
  • Empty Mail Filter v1.0.2 : This filter blocks e-mails that are empty or contain very few words.
  • No Comment! Filter v1.0.0: This filter blocks e-mails that contain HTML comments. Spammers sometimes use HTML comments.
  • RFC-Validator 1.2.0: Filters mails that are not RFC conform or malicious
  • Scripts Filter v1.0.2: This filter blocks e-mails that contain embedded HTML scripts.
  • S_P_A_C_E Filter: Eliminates e-mails containing spaced-out words like `v 1.a g-r a` or `v.i c.0~d.i_n`.

There are lots more, all can be downloaded from the official homepage.

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Comments

  1. PhiliWeb said on August 3, 2022 at 11:07 am
    Reply

    Spamihilator has finally been updated, version 1.7.0 was put online on June 4th. This maintenance update finally improves security with support for TLS 1.2 & 1.3 protocols (via OpenSSL 3.0.3). :-)

    https://www.spamihilator.com/en/blog/spamihilator-1.7-has-been-released/

    Spamihilator v°1.7 – This is the complete list of changes :

    – Improved compatibility with mail accounts from Web.de and GMX
    – Support for newer encryption algorithms
    – Updated certificate for encrypted connections between your mail client and Spamihilator

  2. PENIPUTUA said on August 2, 2017 at 10:13 pm
    Reply

    GREAT

  3. Nnyan said on June 20, 2006 at 7:05 pm
    Reply

    As a previous user of Spamihilator I can say that its a pretty good program. I installed in on dozens of friends computers. But I had a bunch of issues with users that had a very high volume of e-mail. I went from using this to POPFile and while popfile is not 100% trouble free its much more reliable.

  4. Brad Clarkston said on December 10, 2005 at 8:49 pm
    Reply

    Spamihilator would require me to use a Microsoft OS at home, which I wouldn’t do for any reason. It also only runs as a proxy in local userspace instead of on a server filtering multiple workstations. It’s a good little program but very limited in scope and ability.

    SpamAssassin can run as a ‘spam server’ filtering thousands of e-mail accounts or it can be installed as a windows proxy program like Spamihilator.

    It really depends on what your trying to do and what level of comfort you have with letting the spam get to your local computer before you bother to filter it. Personally I run several servers at home one of which is a Slack box running SpamAssassin to filter pop3 and imap accounts.

    1. Phil Smith said on January 16, 2011 at 2:25 pm
      Reply

      Hiya, I am currently using SpamAssasin but looking to get rid because it states it can not handle IMAP mail. It also can not handle more than 1POP mail account. So how do you make it work with IMAP?

  5. Martin said on November 8, 2005 at 12:49 pm
    Reply

    To be honest, I have not used another spam program for the last two years. Spamihilator filters spam as good as a program can, I don´t see a reason to try out different ones if I already have a program thats really good.

  6. jm3 said on November 8, 2005 at 2:15 am
    Reply

    how does it compare to spamassassin?

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