Back to work after the weekend, which was a bit poopy to be honest. Nothing drastically bad happened to blame for the poopiness: it was just one of those weekends where I felt really crappy and down, so didn't do very much at all.

Today, I installed GIANT Company's Spam Inspector. Unfortunately, McAfee's SpamKiller started crashing Outlook every time I opened the latter with it running. This was very strange, particularly since the program reported it was conflicting with my virus checker... which is also from McAfee! Whatever: I removed it, or, more specifically, only found out that the Killer was the problem after I'd moved everything to a new laptop... d'oh!

I went looking for alternatives which would work on Windows 2000 with Outlook 2002 (the setup on any laptop from work). Spam hunting programs seem to come in three categories these days: complete with some annoyingly missing options, POP3 only and really crappy.

The last of the three is pretty easy to spot: huge, horrendously ugly applications that provide bad reporting options, bad filtering and generally work off a local database of 'known spammers'. Of course, since spammers' addresses change all the time, this is the most ineffective method.

The POP3 only utilities are generally quite good - offering filtering on message content, pretend-bouncing of emails (in the hopes of being removed from the spammers' lists) and good reporting. However, I use POP3, Exchange and HTTP email, so that would limit things somewhat. They also tend to be separate programs which one must run before launching Outlook: since I am connected all day and check for mail every 3 minutes, this is rather impractical. Bummer.

Finally, I find myself reduced to one of a very small list of available programs/plugins. SpamKiller is one that will deal with Exchange and HTTP email, but as noted earlier, it crashes my system. It also runs separately to Outlook, but integrates reasonably well. The only other program I have found for the moment (that is bearable and good enough to remain installed for a few days) is Spam Inspector.

It's missing some options, as most programs are: I'd like to be able to give it an address to automatically report spam to (rather than type it in every time if it's not on their list); I'd like to be able to choose where to put my spam quarantine folders (rather than just 'under Inbox or under Deleted Items'); I'd like to be able to bounce the email and report it in one fell swoop; I'd like it to always give me a choice whether to include a sender's ISP on a spam report; I'd like to be able to remove a false positive from quarantine with a choice of adding either the email address or the domain to my friends list automatically.

Still, all things considered, it's a neat little program. It integrates fully with Outlook (i.e. it has a toolbar and menu), which saves me having extra stuff running. It filters after mail retrieval, which means I do not need to run it before running Outlook. For the moment, the only major downside is that it doesn't seem to deal with HTTP mail. Not bad.