The most impressive results were achieved by Microsoft Forefront, Symantec Brightmail and M86 MailMarshal, while newcomer to the test Sophos also put in an excellent performance.

VB’s Anti-spam Test Director Martijn Grooten said: "We are really pleased that all of the products in this month’s test achieved a VBSpam award. This doesn’t mean that no bad products exist - after all, we only test products that developers have chosen to submit to us - but it does go to show that there is plenty of choice available to customers, as well as a healthy amount of competition for product developers."

The VBSpam quadrant plots products’ spam catch rate against their false positive rate, with the top right-hand corner the area products should be aiming for (with maximum spam catch rate and minimum false positive rate). In this test Microsoft

The bimonthly VBSpam tests use Virus Bulletin’s live email stream as well as a spam corpus provided by Project Honey Pot. The mail is sent to all the products participating in the test in random order, thus exposing each to exactly the same email stream, in real time. The tests measure both the false positive rate and the spam catch rate of the products, with VBSpam certifications awarded to products that exceed a predefined benchmark based on both measurements.

The results of the March 2010 anti-spam comparative review can be seen at http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/resu... [registration required - free of charge]

The full review, including detailed results tables, is available to Virus Bulletin subscribers at:

http://www.virusbtn.com/pdf/magazin...