Cloudmark Spam Blocker Review

Review summary

Good points

Bad points

Our verdict

Cloudmark DesktopOne is an excellent anti-spam product. While it lacks an extensive feature set, it blocks spam more effectively than most competing products.

Full review

The number of spam messages flooding e-mail accounts around the world continues to grow at an alarming rate. Currently, spam accounts for more than 90% of all e-mail traffic on the Internet. Without an effective anti-spam tool, checking e-mail can be a real challenge. Fortunately, there are plenty of anti-spam tools that are currently available. One of these tools, Cloudmark DesktopOne, prevents spam with a unique, community-based method of filtering. To test this method's effectiveness, we installed DesktopOne on our system.

Setup

Installing DesktopOne is quite easy. From start to finish, the entire installation takes no more than one or two minutes to complete. Also, aside from the few clicks required to get through the EULA, DesktopOne's installer is automated.

Once we had DesktopOne installed on our system, we were greeted by the configuration wizard. With the help of this wizard, we were able to configure the anti-spam filter to work with our e-mail accounts and Thunderbird, our e-mail client, without any issues.

Compatibility

DesktopOne is compatible with most popular e-mail clients, including Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Thunderbird. When used with one of the aforementioned clients, the DesktopOne toolbar will appear within it. This toolbar was designed to streamline the spam-blocking features of DesktopOne, which it manages to do quite well.

Those who prefer using webmail services, such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, will be pleased to learn that DesktopOne is compatible. Obviously, however, the toolbar feature will not work with browser-based e-mail services.

Detection

DesktopOne detects spam in a manner similar to SPAMfilter Pro. It relies on the input of its users to determine which messages are spam. When enough people mark a specific message as spam, DesktopOne will ensure that this message never reaches the inboxes of other users. While its effectiveness is highly dependent on the decisions that DesktopOne users make, we have found that this method of spam filtering often produces better results than probability-based filtering techniques, such as Bayesian filtering.

Effectiveness

While testing DesktopOne, we were continually impressed by its effectiveness. Not only was DesktopOne able to block a large percentage of the spam sent to our e-mail account, it did not send a single legitimate message to the spam folder. When it comes to e-mail filtering, false positives are a serious issue. Knowing that DesktopOne is capable of filtering most spam without deleting important messages should put most users, especially novices, at ease.

System performance

On our system, DesktopOne ran smoothly from the very start. We never encountered any performance issues. Checking e-mail in Thunderbird was as speedy as ever. In fact, without dozens of spam messages to wade through, the time required to download, read, and send e-mails was noticeably reduced.

Features

On-demand scanning – This allows users to scan their e-mail accounts for spam at any time. For users who receive a lot of e-mail, this may be a useful feature.

Rescanning – Since DesktopOne's spam filtering relies on the input of its community, new spam messages have a chance of slipping through. Fortunately, users can use the rescanning feature to enable spam-filtering scans at set intervals. More often than not, spam missed in a previous scan will be detected and removed later.

Ease of use

DesktopOne is certainly one of the easiest anti-spam tools to use. We configured it to run with Thunderbird, and the DesktopOne toolbar automatically appeared within the client. Using the toolbar, we were able to block spam and open the DesktopOne window. From this window, we were able to view the total number of spam messages blocked, change accounts, and more. Users capable of configuring their e-mail clients should be more than comfortable utilizing nearly every feature present in DesktopOne.

Help & support

Despite the fact that most users will probably have no issues with DesktopOne, Cloudmark offers extensive support options. From the Cloudmark website, users have access to an FAQ, an active forum, a knowledge base, and more. Additionally, support staff are available to answer technical questions via telephone and e-mail.

Overall

Cloudmark DesktopOne is an attractive anti-spam product for a variety of reasons. The most important reason, of course, is that it blocks most spam without deleting legitimate e-mails. This software is also incredibly easy to use and will perform well on nearly any system. While it would be nice to have a few extra features thrown in, we would still recommend DesktopOne to anyone who needs an effective spam filter.

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Overall
Setup
Compatibility
Detection
Effectiveness
System performance
Features
Ease of use
Help & support