SentryBay puts the record straight on Inbox100

* After this review was published, the Herald was contacted by the maker of InBox100, SentryBay, who strongly disagreed with the conclusions of the review. The SentryBay response can be read at the end of the review.

* Also, in the original version of this review we stated incorrectly that Inbox100 cost US$24.95 per year. The price of US$24.95 is, in fact, for a full purchase and there is no annual fee. The Herald apologises for this error.

Review by FRANCIS TILL

Spam messages are like wild rodents - often filthy and sometimes carrying viruses that can sicken or even kill your computer.

So adding spam filters to your personal email system is a sensible idea.

Enter Inbox100 from New Zealand security software vendor SentryBay, a tool that depends on "whitelisting" technology that is designed to work with Outlook and Outlook Express.

The tool allows only messages from addresses in your address book or sent mail folder to appear in your inbox. Messages from all other addresses are shuttled off to a "quarantine" folder for later inspection.

If your email system is set to automatically add the addresses of senders, anyone who has sent you spam is likely to be included in that initial whitelist. If you've ever sent a message to a spammer asking them to remove your name, new mail from them will get past Inbox100 because that address will be in your sent mail folder.

The "quarantine" folder has a couple of interesting features. First, no message in quarantine can be viewed in the full preview viewing pane, which means you can't accidentally trigger a virus.

Then, pictures - including "web beacons" - are clipped off by default, so spammers can't verify your address when you do view the messages (and your kids can't get a nasty sex education lesson by accident).

The software also adds a couple of buttons to the dashboard that allow you to accept or reject any email in the quarantine folder.

If you click "accept" the system will accept all future email from that address. Click "reject" and it automatically discards anything else that comes from that address.

While the buttons work only on mail in the quarantine folder, both white and black lists can be manipulated manually, which helps if you click the wrong button accidentally.

The program doesn't handle everything equally well. Some types of subscription email, for example, turn up in the quarantine folder no matter how many times they're put on the whitelist.

Also, new users who get high volumes of legitimate email will spend a lot of time riffling through the quarantine folder, especially if the address book doesn't add addresses automatically.

The lack of a preview pane view can make vetting onerous, especially since that means users will sometimes have to fully open messages to determine if they're spam.

The software theoretically sorts messages in the quarantine folder, ranking them by the likelihood of being spam, but that feature worked very poorly and would have been only marginally useful even if it had worked a treat.

On balance, however, the tool is good, if a bit draconian, for pre-XP versions of Outlook, which comes with a much more sophisticated spam filter program.

Inbox100

* US$24.95 (about $40).

*

Sentry Bay

. Download: 2.39 MB (a couple of minutes). Free trial: 30 days, with startup nag screen.

* Pros: Useful in family environments and for low-volume users or businesses that want to seriously restrict email. Easy to install, intuitive to use, works alongside other spam filter tools.

* Cons: Black and white approach means users spend too much time sorting through mail in the quarantine folder. Adds nothing to Outlook XP spam filter options.

"To try and argue that XP is more sophisticated because it uses one piece of technology that our program does not have, doesn't hold any merit. XP does not have whitelisting - so it cannot keep your inbox spam-free (key objective of a spam filter I would suggest). It takes three steps to add a sender to the junk mail filter instead of one with our program, and you cannot add more than one sender at a time!

"It is also hard to find and set-up in the first place, hence it's only used by a small proportion of users. You also need to get manual updates from [Microsoft] of what are the bad terms (i.e. what constitutes spam). These change daily. Who is going to do that?

"Our program changes its spam probability ranking for every mail received and how it is treated by the user - in real time. Again, all the reasons why [Microsoft] developed a proper spam program in Outlook 2003. But the review compares us to being unsophisticated to an old spam filter (XP), not a new one that is not yet widely used.

"It is not unsophisticated in comparison to Outlook XP. It is a full spam solution (Outlook XP is not), it gives a spam-free inbox, effective immediately on installation and is user-friendly. XP does not free your inbox of spam, only begins working over time, and is not user-friendly."

Clarification

* The Herald accepts Mr Whittington's comments but encourages readers to download the 30-day free trial version of Inbox100 and test drive the software themselves.

* Further reviews of Inbox100 and Sentry Bay products can be found at

Sentry Bay