Customer Reviews

McAfee Spamkiller V4.0

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I like the spamkiller ok but it requires you to run McAfee Security Center which is an entirely different program that tells you what virus, hacker, abuse and spam software products you have and then tells you why their products are better than whatever you have and why you should give them money right away. It requires you to run this program all the time! a wasteful use of RAM! If you try to run the uninstaller, it says you must uninstall spamkiller and any of their other products first! You have to run this program if you want the spamkiller! If you disable it at the windows startup then you get an annoying window every 7 minutes saying it has been more than 7 days since security center has been able to check in with them! This is like SPYWARE to me - not a program that prevents spying but one that actually spies on what all programs you have and constantly reports that information to McAfee so they can constantly bombard you with why you need to give them money to change to their products! BEWARE.

I have tried a couple of other anti-spam programs that run inside MS Outlook. This one runs seperately and is just one huge burden to operate. It even managed to lock up XP Pro operating system. It is a terrible product and I am so disgusted by it I am going to cancel my McAfee virus program also.

A typical "you have to set the rules" piece of software. First of all, SpamKiller sits between your e-mail program and your server. When you D/L your e-mail, SpamKiller gets it first. YOU then have to decide what to let through and what not to let through. Quite honestly, I could do that just by letting my e-mail program D/L the mail and then look through it. By the time you set up enough "rules" so that SpamKiller automatically junks that e-mail, you have started to eliminate mail you want. I say "no go" on this one.

I installed this product under Windows 98 and immediately had a
problem. When running the check mail feature, it would slowly
eat up virtual memory until the swap file was >1GB and
I had to kill the process.. This could, of course, be a configuration issue
rather than a problem with the product but the real problem started when I tried to get help. Barring paying their support
line to get their product to work, the only recourse appears to be a chat line. I spent an hour on the chat line performing steps which it was obvious to me weren't the problem. The most
annoying part was that some of these steps required a reboot and thus reconnect to the chat and when I did that, I was told the person I spoke to a minute earlier was "gone for the day". This happened twice in an hour forcing me to start all over and describe the problem and what had been tried,etc. until I finally gave up on them and the product.

Everything is easy to implement and works quickly over a broadband connection. There are only two drawbacks: the main one is that it doesn't integrate into your email program (Outlook, Eudora, e.g.) and a lesser one is that when you open Spamkiller it defaults to the killed (filtered) email rather than the live email, which are the ones you want to read.

Installed the software and it completely reconfigured my Outlook Express, while not helping immediately with the spam. Filters were for individual messages so each new message would have it's own filter - why bother? Probably a good program but I don't have the time to put into it. A program like this should run seamlessly! It also installed Mcaffe security center which constantly pestered me and couldn't be turned off or uninstalled without uninstalling Spamkiller!! I have uninstalled everything and will put up with the spam until they get it right.

A typical "you have to set the rules" piece of software. First of all, SpamKiller sits between your e-mail program and your server. When you D/L your e-mail, SpamKiller gets it first. YOU then have to decide what to let through and what not to let through. Quite honestly, I could do that just by letting my e-mail program D/L the mail and then look through it. By the time you set up enough "rules" so that SpamKiller automatically junks that e-mail, you have started to eliminate mail you want. I say "no go" on this one.

This program is very effective at detecting and segregating SPAM email. However, that is where its usefullness ends. The other things to "fight SPAM" like sending error messages that your email address doesn't exist and sending complaint letters to website administrators do nothing to stop or even decrease the amount of SPAM you receive. Most of the complaint letters and error messages you send come back as "undeliverable." I bought version 4.0, and since version 4.5 is now available, my version does not work at all. I am required to purchase the new version because I already used up my 30 day free trial period.

No program is going to be 100% effective in eliminating SPAM as spammers are continually coming up with ways to get around filters and the like. That being said, this is a fairly good product. After a few days of tweaking, it's been over 75% effective in reducing the amount of SPAM in my inbox. I agree with the previous reviewer in that the main drawbacks are that it doesn't integrate with your email program (I use Outlook Express) and that it defaults to viewing the killed email rather than the live email upon launching the program. So far it has been 100% effective in getting rid of the sex related SPAM and its filters have effectively removed SPAM that I know I could not have filtered myself using the message rules in Outlook Express. Overall, I am happy with my purchase.

This is the type of product that makes you scratch your head wondering whether it was worth the purchase or not. It really doesn't add much beyond the normal filtering capabilities of MS Outlook or Outlook Express. You have to invest the time to set up rules for filtering in order to make it halfway decent. There's nothing to distinguish it from the plethora of other anti-spam software out there.

McAfee recently purchased the rights to a competing anti-spam product, which many feel is a superior product (Spam Assassin). Hopefully they will use the technology to improve on Spamkiller in the future.