Unwanted spam mails in digital mailboxes are not only annoying, they can be expensive and even dangerous. According to Cisco Systems, spam e-mails account for around 85 percent of global e-mail traffic. The most common forms promise financial gains, offers that are too good to be true, or dubious contact requests.
Test conditions
However, they often link to phishing pages, contain botnet malware or ransomware. These exploit private information, use resources for unfair purposes, or extort their victims. PC Magazine, in cooperation with the security laboratory AV-Comparatives, has tested the most important security suites for their anti-spam functions, so that such mails do not even land on your computer.
ESET Smart Security
The AV Comparatives laboratory tested a number of widely used anti-spam programs. Over 127,000 spam emails were intercepted, modified and sent for the test. Modification was necessary for the e-mail program to recognize the mails as directly sent messages and not to forward them. In addition, the testers were looking for e-mails that were spam-marked as spam in another short-term test. After that, none of the test programs was particularly vulnerable to spam.
G DATA Internet Security
The test platforms ran under Windows 7 (64-bit) and used Outlook 2013. The Outlook's own spam protection nevertheless achieved a success rate of 89.87 percent and provided a useful guideline. Since the anti-spam programs tested were almost exclusively part of a larger security suite, it can not be ruled out that some spam emails were already intercepted by the anti-virus component of the respective suite. This may result in the results of the anti-spam components being slightly corrupted.
Bitdefender Internet Security
Likewise, the other components such as antivirus, etc., if present, were not tested. For this, read our dedicated antivirus test for 2017. Nevertheless, the purchase price refers to the total packages. And so it is not useful in the test to award a prize.
The anti-spam component of ESET Smart Security integrates itself into the Outlook design with its own tab. This makes the usage particularly comfortable, since one can mark mails and the sender addresses with a few clicks as desired or undesired without the E- Mail client. ESET offers similar functions with its own context menu when right-clicking on an e-mail. This allows the maintenance of black and whitelists.
If you want to change the subject of spam mail for easy identification, or create a special folder to which the spam mail should be moved, you can determine this in the configuration of the program. In addition, ESET Anti-Spam works perfectly automatically.
View: ESET Smart Security on Amazon
When you are using it for the first time or if you want to use new Black / Whitelist settings, you have the option to re-scan the inbox. With 99.96 percent success rate in the spam detection, ESET gained a smarter leadership compared to the competition and also gained the test victory thanks not least to the other features.
Similar to ESET, G DATA's anti-spam component also contains ribbon buttons in the Outlook client. These allow black and whitelist maintenance as well as a virus scan of the marked folder. Diesel functions can also be found in the context menu by right-clicking on the e-mail.
No configuration is required for use. However, in the settings, you can select some criteria to refine spam detection, such as: A word filter in the text or subject.
Unfortunately, G DATA does not have a function to re-scan the inbox. New settings are therefore only applied to future incoming e-mails. In our test, G DATA blocked 99.41 percent of all spam mails. This is the third best result among the tested programs.
BitDefender continues the trend of Outlook integration. Only with description of the anti-spam ribbons stands out Bitdefender. Instead of black and whitelists, you manage spammers and friends. On the other hand, this may help those who are not yet well-versed in Internet Security. On the other hand, this could also cause confusion, as there is a risk of confusion with the address book.
SuperSpamKiller Pro
A special configuration is also not necessary with Bitdefender. In addition, the program has a function that filters out emails with Asian characters or Cyrillic characters. Unfortunately, BitDefender can not scan the inbox again with new settings. The success rate of filtered spam emails was 98.84 percent in the test.
Now, however, a program dances out of the line: SuperSpamKiller Pro is neither part of a larger security suite, nor does it integrate into Outlook. The program offers an additional e-mail client, which is only intended for the spam check (but you can also answer or forward e-mails from there). Only after the e-mails have run through the anti-spam program will they be downloaded from Outlook and landed in your inbox. Emails marked as spam are visible on the Mailserver via SuperSpamKiller Pro and await manual deletion by the user.
Kaspersky Internet Security
An installation wizard guides you through the configuration, but it is quick and simple. If the automatic addition of the e-mail address does not work as in our test, you can also enter it manually. If you can set up an e-mail address in Outlook, you should have no problems.
Lesetipp: 9 Tips for Outlook 2010/2013
A retroactive application of new filter rules by scanning the e-mail again is not possible. However, since SuperSpamKiller Pro downloads and classifies mail as classified, the scan was not expected.
AVG Internet Security
Conclusion
The spam block rate of the program was 99.72 percent only the test winner, so SuperSpamKiller Pro is an efficient alternative for users who do not necessarily want to purchase a complete security suite.
Kaspersky, however, re-joins the programs, which belong to a larger security suite and function as Outlook integration. Instead of a separate anti-spam ribbons, Kaspersky Internet Security adds two buttons of the Home Ribbon series from Outlook, but they only appear when they are needed. Users can manually mark emails as spam or non-spam. A black / whitelist can not be created.
Spam protection does not require any configuration, but it is switched off by default. For activation, the user must first control the settings of the Kaspersky Suite under "Anti-Spam". After the protection is activated, the choice is between low, recommended and high security standards.
A subsequent scan of the inbox is not possible. In Kaspersky Anti-Spamtest, Kaspersky scored well with 97.97 percent success rate despite all.
At the request of AV Comparatives, Kaspersky announced that desktop e-mail clients with additional spam protection are extremely rarely used. According to internal statistics, only 1 percent of Kaspersky users would have switched on the standard deactivated function. Therefore, Kaspersky Lab is focused on other security features of its software.
The spam protection of AVG adds a separate group in the Outlook Home tab. This allows you to mark mails as spam or desired and to call the Anti-Spam configuration directly. An easy to use Blacklist is unfortunately not included. However, you can add them manually within the configuration addresses to block them. This is, of course, much more complicated than the Black / Whitelist maintenance of other applications.
Again, there is no option for AVG to scan the inbox retroactively. ESET remains the only vendor to support this option.
Spam detection is also very good at AVG with 97.81 percent.
Unfortunately, Kaspersky's view of things is a growing trend. With the proliferation of Webmail clients and smartphone email apps, the market for spam protection is shrinking to private desktop clients and is therefore increasingly neglected.
Each program in the test could deliver very good to excellent results in the spam fight, so the test victory in the sub-categories decided. ESET reached the first place with its numerous configuration options, which can also be applied afterwards to an already scanned inbox. The 99.96 percent almost spell-proof detection rounds off the overall picture. The distance to the competition is however very thin.
No comments:
Post a Comment