Anti-spam tools went through a bout of function test

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» 05 May 2010

Anti-spam tools went through a bout of function test

The findings in the anti-spam software analysis that was initiated by Virus Bulletin are now released. According to the report of this well-known journal on online security, about 18 out of 21 tried anti-spam tools passed the careful examination and received certification for this achievement. The broadcasted result is actually a part of the VB Spam report for this month of May.

All products must undergo comprehensive inspection

The test operates by sending a bulk of spam mails and observes the ability of the anti-spam device to ward off these junk messages. Virus Bulletin will rate the tool as to its capacity to block the incoming spam mails and sort out those that are genuine messages.

Computation of the final score for each of the participating anti-spam vendors is done by obtaining the product of false positive percentage and three. After this, the product is subtracted from the percentage of the true spam messages that were blocked by the anti-spam software. The passing mark assigned for the anti-spam tools is a grade greater than 96. Upon summarizing, Virus Bulletin found out that about 17 of the 20 anti-spam devices that underwent the whole examination reached the passing score.

Merging different anti-spam devices increases protection

Spamhaus ZEN plus DBL blacklist together with the other approved anti-spam applications were found to be one of the effective answers for the problem of spam mails. This also went through thorough examination and it received certification from a different classification.

Some failed to give high level of security

The three anti-spam tools did not pass the examination either because these devices classified greater than two percent of the non-spam messages into the junk section or it segregated less than 98 percent of spam mails.

MessageStream and modusGate both did not gain passing scores since it has greater percentage of false positive messages. However, the two anti-spam products were able to seize greater than 99 percent of the true spam mails.

Sunbelt’s Vipre did not meet the requirement for certification as well. It was able to block lower than 98.5 percent of the spam messages and it also has a false positive rate that is under one percent.

The anti-spam products that were able to hold high positions in the quadrant ranking system of VBSpam are the following: Symantec Brightmail, BitDefender, Sophos, Microsoft Forefront, and Libra Esva.

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