Program: Mailbox Guard
Author: Piotr Walczak
Platform: Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2K, XP
License: $29.50
Purchase: Click here to purchase

Mailbox Guard lets you see your mail before you receive it. It detects viruses, spam, and obscenity in your mail and even ranks the risk for you, in four categories:

VIRUS - active malware; viruses, worms, trojans, spyware etc.
SPAM - all kinds of unsolicited mail.
X_Rated - messages with adult only contents X and R rated.
Bad Language - messages with foul, obscene, explicit language.

This is a great program, especially if you have kids around while you are checking your email. Like other spam filtering programs, Mailbox Guard flags emails that may be spam. Unlike most other programs, it also flags email that contains foul language, pornographic material, viruses, and spyware.

A complaint that I hear all the time is that huge, obscene, pornographic images pop up in spam when it is being deleted, often while the kids are within view of the monitor. You don't even have to open the email for this to happen! Thanks to the preview pane in Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, this can happen even if you are just selecting the email to delete it. Mailbox Guard flags the message as spam and as pornographic and lets you delete it from the email server without ever downloading it.

Each email is ranked in each of the four categories above with a color-coded meter, making it easy to see how likely the message is to match that category. You can also enter your own words for it to watch for. If you don't like purple monkeys, you can have it mark all emails talking about "purple monkeys" for deletion.

If a message is flagged, you can add the sender to a whitelist so that their mail always comes through, no matter what the content. On the other hand, if a message comes from a source from which you never want to receive mail, you can blacklist it and it will be marked for deletion every time.

You can highlight an email and preview the first several lines in plain text by clicking the "Preview" tab. Click the "Headers" tab and it will show you the full headers of the message. The "Details" tab shows you the name and email address of the sender and recipient, the size of the message, if there are any attachments, and how closely it matches the filtered categories.

Good Points

1. The ability to delete messages from the server without ever downloading them is easily the most useful feature. There is nothing more infuriating than to download two, or three, or ten 100KB emails over dialup just to discover once you've downloaded them that they are infected with the Klez or Sobig viruses.
2. The text and headers preview is very useful. You can read short notes from friends and delete them.
3. I like the filtering for swearing and pornographic language. Many parents inadvertently expose younger children to vile images while deleting porn spam.
4. If you have several POP3 email accounts, you can set them all up in Mailbox Guard. You can also pick and choose which ones you want to check automatically, and which ones you prefer to check manually.
5. Unlike many authors, Mailbox Guard's developer listens to users' concerns. When first tested, the program popped up warning and confirmation prompts at several points, unnecessarily in my opinion. This became extraordinarily annoying. After asking if this could be made optional in a future build, the developer produced a new build an hour later that did just that. A software maker willing to do that scores a lot of points with me.
6. The help file is very brief and to the point. It could stand to have some more material, but at least you don't have to wade through 3 pages of marketing hype before finding the important information.

Bad Points

1. The program only checks POP3 email, not HTTP or IMAP. That means that you cannot check your Hotmail or Yahoo mail with it.
2. The program's main window cannot be resized unless you click on it while the mouse is over a certain tiny spot on the side. This is not explained anywhere and I found it by accident.
3. There is no way to know whether a box is checked or not unless you happen to know the difference between a blue and an amber-colored box. FYI, amber means checked, blue means unchecked
4. The spam and language filtering is overly aggressive, a flaw common to most spam filtering software. For instance, my own newsletter scores highly as spam ;-). As with all other filters, I'd advise not letting it delete anything without first being reviewed by you.
5. Once the program starts a task, it appears to freeze completely until it finishes.
6. The program's window resets to default size when I close it, forcing me to resize each time I start it.

Recommendations

1. Support for Hotmail should be considered.
2. The window should be resizable from any point on the window, not just one small area. The size that is chosen should also "stick", and not reset the next time you run the program.
3. The ability to view the source of the email would be nice.
4. An "Abort" button to cancel a server check. Sometimes servers don't respond, but also don't reject connections, and that could tie up the program for several minutes.

Conclusion

All in all, while there is room for improvement, this is an excellent program. With spam accounting for roughly half of all email, we need all the tools we can get. The combination of language, porn, virus, and spam filtering and its ability to kick spam off the server without downloading it makes Mailbox Guard one of the better filtering programs available.

Click here to purchase this product