Test shows anti-spam products less effective

A group test of server and client-based spam filtering solutions shows that most have become less effective at catching junk mail, according to an independent testing body.

In the latest test, the biggest problem for the anti-spam solutions was phishing emails. More than half of the solutions missed at least 10 percent of such messages.

Worse, legitimate emails were problematic too for the spam filters: just four managed to correctly identify all of the ones used in the test.

"It is obvious why missing a phishing email is bad and could have serious consequences, but even an ordinary spam email can be much more than a nuisance in the inbox," Virus Bulletin's anti-spam test directors Martijn Grooten said.

While spam levels have declined over recent years and catch rates remained high, Grooten nevertheless said that detailed analysis of spam filters show that more junk mail is making it through the defences.

Of the 19 solutions tested, 17 earnt a VBSpam award. The top two products were Libra Esva and Bitdefender, both of which had no false positives.

At the other end of the scale, McAfee's SaaS Email Protection which is a cloud-based solution, failed to achieve an award, ditto the SPAMFighter Mail Gateway.

The Virus Bulletin test ran for sixteen consecutive days, with 84,576 emails being sent, 71,298 of which were spam.