Does Avast antispam do anything?

[Niteperson]

I recently upgraded to Avast Internet Security because of the added antispam feature.  However, it does not appear to be doing anything.  It says it's checking email, but it doesn't appear to be blocking anything.  I'm using Windows Live Mail on Windows 7 Home 64-bit.  It defaulted to medium sensitivity and I changed it to high hoping it might actually catch something.  I find it hard to believe I can have the software for almost a week without a single spam email getting caught.  Am I missing something?

[Pondus]

It is working in my comp, all the penis enlargment and viagra, cialis mail is marked as spam 

[DavidR]

I recently upgraded to Avast Internet Security because of the added antispam feature.  However, it does not appear to be doing anything.  It says it's checking email, but it doesn't appear to be blocking anything.  I'm using Windows Live Mail on Windows 7 Home 64-bit.  It defaulted to medium sensitivity and I changed it to high hoping it might actually catch something.  I find it hard to believe I can have the software for almost a week without a single spam email getting caught.  Am I missing something?

So the real questions is, are you getting spam emails in your inbox then ?

If so is the Mail Shield and anti-spam actually scanning your email, check the Mail Shield and anti-spam info/stats.

[jgates]

I installed Avast Internet Security last night.  I am running it on a Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit box with 8GB RAM... I recently installed the Microsoft Live technology including email...  I get 40-50 emails a day that qualify as spam... about 75% of that with the ****SPAM**** designation. NONE of it automatically ends up in the "junk email" mailbox...  over recent months I have been using the Live Mail JUNK function to identify users and domains that are spammers and quite a list has been created...

I noticed a couple of things in the program interface...  In the Anti-spam & Blockers - Spam Protection - Spam Settings pop-up it says "MS Outlook only" - Automatically move spam messages to junk folder... UNBELIEVABLE!!! not even Outlook Express? this is 2010... I haven't used either of those programs for years!!!   THEN.... under the blacklist tab... it seems the only way to add to the blacklist is to hand-type the users/domains in... can't cut/paste my whole list from Live Mail... or even one at a time... they have to be typed in one at a time!!!!  From the user's perspective this situation is a SHOW STOPPER... this is the functionality that I was most looking for!!!!

Is Avast working on this functionality??? Delivered any time soon???  Possibility of a refund???

THANX!!!
jgates

[schmidthouse]

Presently I use Mailwasher Pro and it marks everything that is Spam as Spam. I also have an ....@msn.com account and it is exceptional at sending all Spam to JUNK FOLDER for me to process for Blocking and Reporting. If I leave it in Junk after 10 days I believe the processing is done automatically.
For what its worth

[martinB]

In Outlook there is a handy toolbar for avast's Antispam that lets you control its features directly. You can easily click a button to add a sender of an email to the blacklist. But I agree that there should be support for more email clients. Outlook is the most popular one though.

[DavidR]

Yes there is, but why download all the email to first find the spam, with mailwasher a very limited sub set of the email is downloaded, headers, first X lines of email (X being user configurable) text based only. Those automatically or user selected as spam are deleted from the email server before calling the email client to download the remainder of clean ones.

[GloobyGoob]

Yes there is, but why download all the email to first find the spam, with mailwasher a very limited sub set of the email is downloaded, headers, first X lines of email (X being user configurable) text based only. Those automatically or user selected as spam are deleted from the email server before calling the email client to download the remainder of clean ones.

Does it really matter how the spam filter processes messages?

It doesn't matter how the anti-spam determines if a message is spam; If it ends up being marked, it gets automatically moved to the Junk Folder so the goal is accomplished. And, if it is automatically deleted from the server, you can't receive the occasional good mail marked wrongly as spam.

[DavidR]

I have never had a good email marked as spam and deleted as you see the email list and you can if there a known good email flagged you can change it.

The whole point of intercepting the email at server level is so that it isn't on your system in its html state, where there could be other issues like remote links to god knows what, web bugs, etc.

That is why I prefer to filter my email and flag whatever for deletion on the server before downloading the full email.

[GloobyGoob]

My bad.. I have never used Mailwasher so I wasnt sure of the accuracy of it's filtering and I was also confused because your previous post made it seem like it would delete marked emails automatically. But yeah, I never get any falsely marked emails either, only if I use web mail filtering

I still do not get the point of analyzing emails at the server because if a downloaded message is determined as spam, then it would be in the junk folder with HTML (and other properties) disabled anyway.

[DavidR]

What guarantee do you have that it will be flagged as spam and even then it is still in your system but marked as spam and you could still open it to see what it is.

When I see the list of emails (or text based preview if I feel it needs confirmation) I often flag those which aren't high enough up the scale to be automatically flagged. These would otherwise be being downloaded to the system and may well also not be flagged as spam; the difference being it is on your system unmolested and waiting for you to open it.

[GloobyGoob]

If your talking about the spam messages that are not marked and moved then yes, I guess there is benefit to that. Not much though, spam usually isn't harmful itself and you can just move it; spam is easy to identify. But I use AIS and its filtering is accurate and effective; so far I have not experienced any problem with spam.