AVS Antispam is a free spam blocker application that will stop, or seriously impede, the flow of irritating, malicious and suspicious emails to the inbox of the most popular email programs used today. AVS free Antispam boasts it is able to “fight spam intelligently” with an array of high-tech approaches. The program screens and scans each and every email received by the email program.
It analyzes message content, checks IP addresses, scans for spam patterns and checks URLs. Using a system of ‘black’ and ‘white’ lists, AVS Antispam is able to differentiate between legitimate mail and bogus. The black and white lists are created by the users.
As spammers become more and more cunning in their methods, so does this free anti-spam program as users are able to increase (or decrease) the application’s aggressive filtering levels. These are low, medium and high and are able to be adjusted by the user whenever the need arises.
As mentioned above, AVS Antispam is compatible with all of the popular email applications used today. These include MS Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora and others. Other anti spam software available Comodo Antispam, and SpamAssassin.
AVS Antispam uses five different type of filters to detect and block spam:
Heuristic Spam Filter: This filter checks all the emails against pre-defined rules. AVS Antispam comes with hundreds of spam rules. For example, a rule checks email subjects to see if it talks about money rewards. if it does, the email is marked as spam.
Statistical Filter: This is a pretty intelligent filter that checks all the words in the email, and then compares the words against their pre-defined probability of being a part of spam email. Based on this, it calculates overall probability of the email being spam. This filter also keeps improving itself as more and more emails are marked as spam.
Realtime Black List of IP: Each email is checked against a list of IPs that are known to send spam emails.
Realtime Black List of URI: This is similar to the IP filter mentioned above, but it instead uses real time black list URI presence in emails.
Black and White Lists: These are the lists created by you.
Each email is subjected to all the filters above to determine whether it is spam or not. As you would notice, AVS Antispam uses quite an exhaustive set of filters to identify and bloc spam email from reaching your mailbox.
All suspicious emails are recorded and logged by the program. This recorded data is used by the program’s filter as it searches for similar spam patterns. If, in the event, a legitimate message is not received, the user needs only to check the program’s log to find it. He or she is able to “teach” the program that mail from a particular address is legit by simply moving it to the ‘white’ list.
Free Antispam is able to be quickly integrated into the inbox of the aforementioned email programs. For users that wish to take advantage of the options available, he or she is able to view and interact with the main interface on the email client. The black and white lists are accessed from the main interface page.
Free AVS Antispam is available in: English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. This free application is only available for computers running Windows XP, Vista and 7. There is no support, at this time for Mac, or Linux operating systems.
AVS Antispam user interface is simple to use and easy to understand. All icons have commands written in clear concise language that will not confuse or frustrate any novice computer or email user.
