Over the last couple of months the amount of spam I receive has got rather silly and very annoying.

Thunderbird does a reasonable job of filtering spam but its not great and I thought there must be a way of improving the situation. First thing to try was re-enabling the McAfee SpamKiller that I disabled when I installed McAfee Internet Security Suite.  As usual the McAfee software was extremely unhelpful and kept trying to persuade me to download a trial and then purchase even though I actually own the software! At the moment I just don't have time and patience to do battle with the McAfee support staff so I guess that knocks McAfee on the head.

Next on the list was SpamAssassin which is open source and I've heard good things about. Ah! Its all in Perl and although I've enjoyed using Perl in the past, its no longer installed and I don't want to install it just to run anti-spam software.

What I needed was SpamAssassin for Windows and that's when I came across SAwin32 "a free personal anti-spam filter based on SpamAssassin™, SAproxy™, DCC and Razor.". Now, I remember SAproxy as something from Stata Labs who wrote the email client Bloomba (I think its now available as WordPerfect Mail) and I thought it was pretty good except it kept crashing my PC. Anyway, I decided to give it a try and installed it (very easy) and configured it (very easy) and straight away it was detecting spam and so far I am so impressed.

SAwin32 has only been running for a few days but in more than 2,000 emails it has only missed one spam message, given no false positives and I've not had to teach it anything. Now that is impressive!!!