Given that SpamNet and MailWasher are already excellent and cost nothing, that must mean the £20 SpamKiller software is even better, right?

SpamKiller works on the established premise of checking your email on your ISP's server before your email application gets a chance to download it.

Using a variety of filters, it determines which emails are valid and which qualify as unsolicited or spam mails.

Valid emails are left alone while spam is 'killed' by downloading it to a mail folder within SpamKiller.

Installation and configuration is simple enough. SpamKiller imports settings from any existing email accounts and it runs discreetly in the System Tray, playing a sound and popping up a message when new mail is received.

The bad news is that the McAfee Control Centre is also installed and while the system security information it displays is useful if you use other McAfee products, it's a waste of resources if you don't, and it can't be uninstalled.

Equally infuriating are the pop-up messages in the System Tray that warn you about new viruses. These have nothing to do with SpamKiller and, again, can't be turned off.

Unfortunately, SpamKiller itself is just as frustrating. It regularly passed spam as valid emails and regularly misidentified valid emails as spam. New spam filters can be added and the existing ones modified.

As the user is left to decide which parts of an email to base the filter on, however, it can be confusing. The most foolproof way is to add a filter for each new spam message you receive but that is time consuming and tedious.

Worse still, although there is a 'rescue' feature to restore mail wrongly labelled as spam it refused to work on our system, which meant important emails remained imprisoned in SpamKiller's 'killed' mail folder.

Details
Price: £20
Contact: McAfee 020 7949 0107
www.mcafee.com

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