Hands On Report--Sp@mX, the Road to Near Zero Spam at Week 5

It has been 5 weeks since we began a trial of Sp@mX, now up three more updates to v3.2.2, by Hendrickson Software Components (hsc). We bought it for $19.95 with a money-back gurarantee to see if it could significantly reduce our 4000+ weekly spam messgages. We have double filtered our spam but it's not 100% accurate and, therefore, we had to follow a highly time-consuming daily activity. We also occasionally missed and lost an important email.

Sp@mX is not a filtering application. It automatically reports spam to the various server administrators that handled the spam on its way to us. Sp@mX also allows us to send copies to the FTC and the California Dept. of Justice. It relies on server administrators to take action to block our spam based on the reports. We really like Sp@mx's proactive fight-back approach. Here is our initial review of v3.0.2. The developer, Jeff Hendrickson, has continuously improved the product such that now, at v3.2.2, it automatically parses Apple Mail and Eudora Mail files and has a much better Mac OS X user interface.

We provided a progress report at the end of weeks one, two, three and four of our Sp@mX trial. How did we do during week five? Here is a table showing the number of spam messages we received and processed each week:

After a continuous week to week decline in spam through week 3 that resulted in at least a 71 per cent reduction, we saw an increase during week four of 18 per cent and another small increase during week five of 2 percent. We still have over 65 per cent less spam that before we started using Sp@mX.

We occasionally get back automated reponses to Sp@mX reports from server administrators. Here is a table showing the number of abuse reports we received back each week:

The number is up despite our email configuration errors. Are we getting a better class of spam?

We also get Returned Mail error messages in response to Sp@mX reports. Here is a table showing the number of failed delivery responses:

We received 855 delivery failure notifications, a huge number for one week. We received only 54 in total up to last week and only 7 this past weekend.

Our spam load is not yet "near zero" but the huge difference has saved us an enormous amount of time and angst. HSC has a money-back guarantee on its $20 Sp@mX if it does not drive spam to near zero. But we are not going to pack it in yet. We are going to give the latest version another week to see if it can diminish our email further.

Jeff Hedrickson, Sp@mX's developer, wrote that he is continuing to improve it. On his agenda this week are:

• Check for fake URLs in message body;
• Validate email addresses before send; and
• Possibly an Apple Script to automate Sp@mX's use with SpamSieve.

[Bill Fox--Disclaimer: HSC is now an advertiser on Macs Only!]