New Outlook Express Plugin Bans Spam From Your Inbox

By Alan Gray, NewsBlaze

A plug-in for Outlook Express catches spam emails and sends them to a special Spam folder, lets you set Allow and Block lists, bounce spam messages back to their senders and more.

SpamBrave for Outlook Express 2.0, a spam filtering plug-in for Outlook Express was released today.

Digital Turtlets created the plug-in to seamlessly integrate into Outlook Express. After a brief training, it can accurately sort out all incoming mail into good and spam. Good mail goes to your Inbox, while spam is sent to a special Spam folder.

Messages that SpamBrave has difficulty categorizing go to the Unsure folder, where you can sort them manually. SpamBrave learns from emails you categorize, or re-categorize after it has made a mistake. The program keeps statistics about the messages in its training corpus and classification accuracy.

"Instead of traditional anti-spam methods such as blacklists and keywords, SpamBrave blocks junk mail by using Bayesian filtering technology," says Alexander Melnichenko, CEO of Digital Turtlets and author of the program. "Many consider this technology to be the most accurate method of detecting spam.

The best thing about it is that you decide yourself what mail is spam and what not. Any message you consider to be spam will be identified as spam, even if it doesn't correspond to the traditional definition of spam. SpamBrave never stops learning. It gets instructed by correctly categorized emails, thus, self-improving its filtering accuracy."

Before SpamBrave catches its first spam message, it needs to be trained. This means you should offer it messages you consider to be good and spam. SpamBrave analyses their characteristics and builds a knowledge base, which is then used for categorizing incoming mail. Spam messages are sent to the Spam folder, which can be automatically emptied after a predefined period of time.

Should the program make a mistake, you can correct it manually by clicking Spam and Not Spam buttons on Outlook's toolbar. As an extra anti-spam tool, Spam Brave allows you to set the Allow and Block lists to allow and block emails coming from particular email addresses and domains.

Also, you can bounce spam messages back to senders so that it looks as if your address does not exist. This discourages spammers from spamming you again. Of course, this only works if they use a valid FROM address, which they usually do not, so use this feature with care, because you could be accused of spamming yourself.

Read more details about SpamBrave at http://www.spambrave.com

SpamBrave Pricing and Availability SpamBrave for Outlook Express 2.0 runs under Windows 98/Me/NT4/2000/XP/2003, requires Outlook Express 5 or higher and 10 Mb of free hard disk space.

Discounts for volume buyers are available. Registration entitles you to free minor version updates, considerable discounts for major version updates and lifetime technical support.

Additional information on SpamBrave for Outlook Express, as well as its no-cost 14-day evaluation version is available from http://www.spambrave.com.

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