Matador 4.1

Product: Matador 4.1
Vendor: MailFrontier
Price: $39.95
Editor Rating: 3 stars

Pros

+ Blocks most spam and allows legitimate mail through
+ Integrates into Outlook and Outlook Express

Cons

- Light functionality
- Good protection, but not as good as other products
- Higher priced than other products

Review

We test each spam filter by first sending 100 spam emails to a test account with the spam filter installed. If necessary, we then train the product, typically by pressing a button marking the email as spam. After the training process is complete, we then send a larger set of spam emails to the same account to determine the overall effectiveness of the product.

If applicable, we tested each spam filter on Outlook Express, Eudora, and Yahoo.

Installation

Matador installed perfectly the first time. It installed seamlessly into Outlook Express and asked if we wanted to import our address book the first time we started our email client.

Usability

Like other good spam filtering applications, Matador was very easy to use. It installed a toolbar directly into Outlook Express with just two buttons, “junk” and “Unjunk” (it also had an options button):

Training

After installing Matador for the first time, we downloaded 96 spam emails and 4 legitimate emails from our test account. It correctly quarantined 94 of the spam emails and allowed the legitimate emails through.

Matador didn’t need any training, so we then imported an additional 291 spam email and 15 legitimate emails. Matador quarantined 238 of them (82%) and allowed all of the legitimate emails to pass through … a respectable showing. However, it failed to stop some blatantly pornographic spam making this a risky choice if you have children.

Other Features

The product was a little light on other features. It does not have a community feature nor some of the more advanced algorithms that our other top ranked products have.

Summary

Matador 4.1 provides very good protection and stopped most of the spam email that we tested with. However, we ranked it lower because it was lacking in features and was higher priced than other more effective products.

Price: $39.95
Free Trial: YES

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