Consumer Reports has rated a free program distributed by an obscure California startup as its top pick among the spam-blocking software it recently tested. SAProxy, developed by Stata Labs, earned a near-perfect score in correctly identifying nonspam messages and directing them to users' in-boxes. But the software was slightly less accurate in blocking unsolicited junk e-mail, earning an 80% accuracy rate. Some of the other software tested edged toward 90% accuracy in that category. The magazine looked at nine add-on programs and two e-mail programs with built-in spam-blocking features, and devised tests using 500 spam messages and 225 nonspam messages. The runners-up were SpamCatcher Universal, Spam Sleuth and Symantec's Spam Alert. The testing methodology didn't allow testing of the spam-blocking features in AOL, MSN and Yahoo. In general, the winning feature in the best spam-blocking programs tested was "the ability to rate messages based on a variety of criteria rather than narrow criteria," said Dean Gallea, who led the tests. (Wall Street Journal 9 Jul 2003)
