"Out of the Box" Filter Performance

I recently converted from Outlook over to Mozilla ThunderBird due to frustrations about how Outlook tends to handle message content. I get a lot of spam forwarded to me from end-users that I need to hand-off to some in-house software for analysis. Outlook unfortunately strips a lot of useful data out of the message in the process of receiving it.

When I'd initially evaluated Thunderbird about 6 months ago - it had some serious problems. It still has a lot of bugs, but it now seems livable.

SpamButcher works as Outlook anti-spam software, with Outlook Express or alternative email clients like ThunderBird.

Back on topic, one of the features I wanted to evaluate was its built-in spam filtering. ThunderBird's filtering is based on the premise of training. To get good filtering performance, users need to tell ThunderBird when it's filtered a message correctly or incorrectly.

In contrast, SpamButcher is designed to be a high performance spam program immediately after installation. To be fair, I didn't spend any time at all training ThunderBird. However, I can certainly say its initial spam filtering was atrocious. It labeled about one third of all my legit messages as spam, then missed about half my actual spam. On the other hand, I'm only so willing to spend time training such a system, when it doesn't show any initial signs of intelligence. Of course, having developed my own program to filter spam may bias my opinion somewhat.

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