Pros & Cons
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- Community-based spam filtering catches most spam without blocking valid mail.
- Handles POP3, webmail-via-POP3, IMAP, or Exchange accounts.
- Separate versions for Outlook Express and Thunderbird support all but Exchange.
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- No support for Vista's Windows Mail as yet.
- Can't filter Web-based accounts if they don't offer POP3 access.
- Costs twice as much as near-identical iHateSpam 5.0.
Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft Outlook Specs
| OS Compatibility: | Windows Vista |
| OS Compatibility: | Windows XP |
| Type: | Personal |
| Type: | Professional |
Cloudmark pioneered the concept of community-based spam filtering, and its community is now over a million strong. Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft Outlook keeps most spam out of your Outlook inbox while marking virtually no valid mail as spam—and that's what I look for in a spam filter. Separate versions of the program support Outlook Express and Thunderbird, and a version for Vista's Windows Mail is in the works.
Where many antispam products filter only standard POP3 e-mail, Cloudmark Desktop strips out spam from any e-mail account that your e-mail client supports. That includes POP3 and IMAP accounts, webmail accounts accessed via POP3, and (for Outlook only) Exchange-based mail accounts. About the only kind of e-mail it can't filter is a Web-based account that doesn't offer POP3 access.
Community Intelligence
Spammers spew their useless or harmful messages to millions of victims, and that fact is part of what makes community-based filtering work. When any community member marks a message as spam, Cloudmark Desktop boils down the message content to a unique fingerprint and sends that fingerprint to a central database. If the database receives enough reports for the exact same message (based on the fingerprint), it concludes that the message really is spam and blocks it for all other members.
If it were as simple as that, a determined spammer could undermine the system by joining the community and marking messages as not spam. To keep people from gaming the system, Cloudmark maintains a trust rating for every user. If the community as a whole agrees that a message you've blocked is spam, your trust rating goes up just a bit. If the community doesn't agree with your assessment, your trust goes down. The higher your trust rating, the more weight your opinion carries.
You can add specific domains or addresses to a whitelist and also automatically whitelist any address that's in your Contacts list. Mail from whitelisted addresses will always get through. But I can't think of a situation where this would be necessary. In order to get misfiled as spam, the identical message would have to be reported as spam by multiple community members. Thus Cloudmark should never identify a unique message from an individual as spam. Most users can ignore the whitelist and leave the other settings at their default values.—
Don't Make Me Work!
You're guaranteed to get some spam in this scenario. I mean, somebody has to be the one in the group of community members who dutifully report spam so that everybody else can avoid it. Just how much spam will you get? Will you become a dismal drudge, an unpaid human spam-filter? To find out, I tested Cloudmark Desktop on e-mail from three real-world spam-infested accounts. While the 15-day free trial is completely functional, I used a registered version in order to get personal rating information and statistics.
Spam filtering doesn't slow the process of downloading messages at all, because the analysis happens within the e-mail client, after the messages have arrived. That was refreshing, as compared with
Cloudmark advises using only current spam messages in testing—no older than a month. That makes sense, as there won't be any community reaction to ancient outdated messages. Before deleting the older messages I looked them over, and indeed a fair number of old spam messages had reached the inbox. After I deleted these antiques, the Inbox looked much better.
How good? To get an accurate read, I sorted the contents of the inbox into three categories: undeniable spam, valid mail from individuals, and valid bulk mail (newsletters and such). I discarded anything that didn't clearly fit one of those categories. I also tossed any with absolutely nothing in the message body. Cloudmark Desktop can't fingerprint a totally blank message; in any case it's hard to argue that a blank message is spam. I sorted out the Spam folder in the same way and then ran the numbers.
Out of over 5,000 messages, Cloudmark Desktop didn't misidentify a single valid message from an individual as spam. It marked just one valid newsletter message as spam, which implies that some number of community members marked that particular message as spam. Including both types of valid mail, its false positive was less than a tenth of one percent. And I was pleased to find that this success did not come at the expense of a spam-filled inbox—less than 2 percent of the undeniable spam made it into the inbox. No drudgery for me! Other antispam products may have near-zero false positives or very low rates of spam in the inbox, but few have both at once.
Just to see what would happen I selected all the spam messages that got into the inbox and actively marked them as spam. I was hoping to see my trust rating rise, but alas, there was no visible change. Apparently one must make steady and consistent contributions to the community before the trust rating rises.
One thing is clear: Community-based filtering is seriously effective, and it doesn't suffer the false positives that plague some other solutions. Even though some spam is guaranteed to get through, the percentage overall is far below that of most other products. You can get this technology straight from Cloudmark or, if you're an Outlook user, choose the less-expensive but equally effective iHateSpam, which takes advantage of the same technology and user community. For the moment, however, Cloudmark supports a wider variety of e-mail clients, and therefore earns our antispam Editors' Choice.
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Final Thoughts
Cloudmark Desktop 5.3.3 for Microsoft Outlook
All the algorithms in the world can't compare with the human mind as a spam-catching tool. Cloudmark Desktop uses its million-strong community to block spam accurately, and it virtually never blocks valid mail in error. It's a fine choice—as long as you use one of the supported e-mail clients.