Spam Filters for Your Mac: Six Choices

April 3, 2007
By

Joe Kissell

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Price: $50

Works with: Apple Mail, Entourage

Pros: Bayesian filter; blacklist; whitelist; attachment checking; integrates well with Mail and Entourage.

Cons: Adds lots of extra stuff (of questionable value) to your system; expensive.

Intego’s Personal Antispam X4 is, I’m sorry to say, a pretty good spam filter. Sorry? Well, here’s the thing. It has a solid set of spam-prevention features, including a Bayesian filter, blacklist, whitelist, attachment checking, and more; it offers the cleanest and most seamless integration with Mail and Entourage of any spam filter available; and it even has a pretty user interface.

But, like all Intego products, it insinuates itself rather deeply into Mac OS X, installing a startup item that requires a restart, a new pane in System Preferences, and a couple of background processes that run all the time. I find all of that (not to mention some questionable marketing practices on Intego’s part) rather icky, and I’d like to be able to tell you that the software itself sucks too. But it doesn’t. On the other hand, it is pricey and doesn’t support many common email clients, so you still have at least two good reasons not to buy it.

SIX CHOICES: