Intego Personal Antispam X5

Intego Personal Antispam X5 is the ultimate spam-fighting tool for Mac OS X. Personal Antispam X5 analyzes your incoming e-mail, determining which messages are spam and which are valid messages, and does so in many ways: by checking a whitelist and blacklist of addresses, message headers, content or layout, URLs in messages, and much more.

Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Almost every Internet user receives spam: undesired e-mail messages selling products and services, messages suggesting that users visit certain web sites, often pornographic, and scams of all kinds. Some people get so much spam that they spend more time sorting their inboxes than they do reading legitimate e-mail; it is not uncommon to receive hundreds of spam messages each day, for only a few dozen legitimate e-mail messages.

Spam is the electronic equivalent of the junk mail you receive in your mailbox. But while much of the junk mail you receive is local -flyers for the neighborhood supermarket, sales at your local sporting goods store- spam generally offers scams and swindles. Some of these include the "Nigerian Scam", or the 419 scam, named after the relevant section of the Criminal Code of Nigeria, where e-mails ask you to help someone obtain several million dollars from a bank account, after you have put up a few thousand yourself as an "advance fee". Other spam messages offer prescription drugs, without a prescription, at rock-bottom prices; software at prices that are too good to be true; messages claiming to be from friends, directing you to check out a specific web site; “phishing” messages, or attempts to get you to log on to a bank web site and enter your user name and password; or e-mail offering you free pornography or miracle solutions to increase the size of certain body parts.

While it is relatively simple to get rid of the junk mail you receive in your mailbox at home, spam is more difficult to detect. The subject headers of spam messages often lead you to think that the messages are from old friends or businesses you have worked with. If you have to sort through all this spam in your inbox every day, especially if you need to read e-mail for your job, you'll waste a lot of time and be less productive.

Personal Antispam X5 uses a set of plug-ins to provide the most powerful spam filter available. You choose which plug-ins you want to use, according to the type of spam you receive. Personal Antispam X5 uses lexical filtering (also known as Bayesian analysis), attachment filters, whitelist and blacklist filters, and also filters URLs, using a database of known spam URLs that are often included in messages. Personal Antispam X5 also looks for specific types of headers and layout used in HTML messages, which are most often used for spam, allowing the program to not only search for content, but also for the subtle ways that spammers craft their messages.

After you have had Personal Antispam X5 learn from your e-mail, you can export your settings and spam database, and give it to friends, family or colleagues, so these people can get optimal spam filtering immediately, without having to wait for Personal Antispam X5 to learn from their e-mail. They can then have the program learn from the more specific types of spam and legitimate e-mail they receive to refine the program’s efficiency.

Spam techniques are constantly changing, and Personal Antispam X5 offers monthly updates to fight new types of spam as they appear, and to update its database of spam URLs.