Out! Out! You Demons of Stupidity!
President Bush signed the "anti-spam" bill yesterday. I have it in quotes because it actually makes legal what would be illegal under tougher state law. For example, I understand that California has a new law that requires opt-in rather than, under the federal law, opt-out.
Not waiting for BigGovernment to "solve" the problem, I've been testing two different spam filters (in addition to SpamAssasin that my host uses). The two are POPFile and K9. Both run on Windows, although POPFile is Perl-based so it could run on any platform that executes Perl. By the way, on Windows even if you don't have Perl installed the PopFile installer will install what is needed so it's fairly easy to get up and running.
After running a little over 1,000 emails through both filters I've found that POPFile is clearly more accurate. Right now, POPFile is at 97 percent. That's 30 errors out of about 1,000 emails. Two of those 30 were real emails that ended up in the spam bucket while the others where spam that made it into the inbox. On the other hand, K9 is at a relatively low 85 percent (i.e., 150 errors) and very slowly rising.
Unless you get so many emails that a Perl-based filter would be too slow, I would recommend PopFile. But whichever you choose, I think relying on only one spam filter is not the way to go. Rather, having a layered approach using different methods to filter the spam seems to be the best that we can do for now. At least, until enough spammers are thrown in jail.