Customer Reviews

Sunbelt iHateSpam 4 [Old Version]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have been using this product for 3 years. To obtain full functionality I also purchased the full edition of Outlook to use along with I Hate Spam.

At first I Hate Spam was moderately effective at filtering spam. It did catch 90% of the spam and almost never incorrectly classified a legitimate email as spam.

However it was also very slow. It took 5 minutes to process 75 incoming emails each morning, and dealing with the 10% of spam missed was extremely inefficient - manually designating a single email as spam would cause Outlook to lock up an agonizing 20 seconds. Designating multiple emails as spam was even more inefficient, and there were anoying limits on how many emails I could designate as spam in a single click.

Customer support was unresponsive to complaints about this product.

After the one year support period for this product elapsed, the performance recognizing spam dropped from adequate (90%) to pathetic (2%). When I purchased renewed support for the product the performance restored to adequate, and then again became pathetic after the expiration of the support window. I strongly suspect that there is a built-in expiration feature that causes this degredation in performance exactly after a year of use.

While I would have been happy to pay for this product as a subscription service, (particularly if it were better supported and not quite so slow), I think it is unethical for the publisher to market it as they do without disclosing the essentially MANDATORY support fees.

This product works great with Outlook - even from behind my company's firewall. There's hardly any installation, and it catches about 95% of the spam (about 75 a day for me).

I have noticed that my system has slowed down at times and even crashed on a few occassions, but this seems to be a common issue with spam software and has not been a real problem.

Easily worth the money - you can also try it out for free.

I used iHateSpam version three and found it to be a marginal product. But when I was offered the online upgrade to version 4 I thought "why not, it's probably better now." Boy was I ever wrong. First, it's filtering is SLOW - slower than version three! Second, it takes way too many system resources, just try to multitask while it's doing it's filtering. Third, it hardly catches any blatent spam while putting more legitimate mail in Quarantine (yes, I've worked extensively with my friends and enemies lists, it just doesn't help). Fourth, when you try to get some help from tech support, you basically get none. They just spin you in circles without ever, EVER, addressing your issues. At this rate, they'll be toast soon. So, if you couldn't already tell, I would advise all to not even think about buying this product - you'll be much better off without it.

The program does a reasonable job of filtering spam, but the so called "bouncing" service is horrible. It freezes up my Microsoft Outlook constantly. Repeated emails to describe my problem sent to their techs have been ignored. I am very disappointed and may end up completely uninstalling this product. Definitely do NOT recommend this if you want a reliable, user-friendly, tech-supported anti-spam device! :-(

This program is complete garbage. It doesn't catch such blatant spam as "Banned government CD". I started getting a lot more of these when I installed their software. Since it'd be very easy for them to update their software to block these emails, I have to conclude they are behind it. How else could a company be so incompetent as to let them through?

Also is the issue of forcing users to pay for upgrades. See they stopped updating the definitions to 3.0 so if you bought 3.0 and want it to catch the latest spam, you have to PAY for an upgrade to 4.0! This is downright pathetic. As soon as you pay for 4.0, they'll have a 5.0 waiting for you I'm sure. Think about it, it only costs $20. So either they plan to sell you the same software 3-4 times by forcing you to upgrade, or they make their money by selling your email address to spammers. Either way watch out.

iHateSpam not only blocks the lion's share of spam I receive, it also allows me to send a (convincing but fake) bounce message and/or report spam abuse to various authorities. iHateSpam also allows the user to easily tag a sender/domain as a friend or enemy and black/whitelist them accordingly. The program is easy to install and configure out of the box, and allows for extensive tweaking to make it work the way you want it to. As a network sysadmin who is very conservative about introducing new software in a corporate environment, I consider iHateSpam to be the most stable, user-accessible and empowering anti-spam software currently available, and have recommended it for corporate use without hesitation.

Most of us with one or more email addresses desperately need spam filtering. I evaluated both IHateSpam v3 and v4. Version 3 was defintely the better of the two in both the amount of spam it catches and in its memory footprint. V4 runs three processes that take up about 25 mb of memory once you activate Outlook. In fact these process continue to stay resident even after you close Outlook. IHateSpam says not to disable or kill them or their product wont work.

On a tip from the internet, I decided to give Outlook's 2003 built-in junk email filtering a go. What a relief - it beats IHhateSpam by a factor of 10 to 1. Outlook catches about 97% of the spam that I get and rarely filters out a valid message. In contrast, IHateSpam v3 caught maybe 35% and required alot of manual maintenance. IHateSpam v4 did not do much better but required less hands-on administration. Outlook 2003 filtering is nearly transparent.

Recommendation is to pass on this product, save 25 mb of memory, and use Outlook 2003 built-in junk email filtering if possible.

Really impressed by the 95% spam accuracy out of the box. With the bayesian training i have it catching close to 99% of the spam, with 0 legitimate email being caught. I'm a linux guy at heart, but on windows and Outlook (corporate sh**t) IhateSpam is awesome.

I used the 3.2 version of this product for some time and judged its performance to be adequate but not stellar for the single-PC user receiving a moderate volume of email. The program quickly learns to block a good percentage of spam but then never seems to get any smarter even when the subject lines are dead giveaways. All newsletters and some personal emails are blocked automatically, forcing you to check your "Quarantine" folder regularly for legitimate email, which then needs to be manually whitelisted. You have the option to report screening errors to Sunbelt Software, ostensibly to improve the product, but I see no evidence that anyone at the company pays attention. I have used free anti-spam products that are at least as effective as IHateSpam.

I recently had to upgrade my installation to the current version (4.0.426) because version 3.2 of IHateSpam did not get along with MS Office XP Service Pack 3. The spam screening performance of version 4.0 is on a par with that of the earlier version, i.e. so-so. But the new version takes a giant step back in another respect. The program creates three background processes that run in Windows all the time, even when Outlook is not running. These processes take up over 25 MB of memory! Even if you use IHateSpam's option to disable the program temporarily, these processes continue to run and take up your system's resources. Why anyone would design a spam filter to function this way is beyond me. I am downgrading my rating from 3 stars to a very generous 2.

Don't waste your time or money with this product. Been there - done that - product doesn't work well - no support - tricky online upgrades that cost $. Get a real product from a honest company such as Norton AntiSpam.