News
18 anti-spam solutions win VBSpam award
January 2011 by Virus Bulletin
Virus Bulletin, the independent security certification body, has announced that 18 out of 20 products entered into its latest round of comparative anti-spam testing earned VBSpam certification.
The most impressive results were achieved by OnlyMyEmail’s MXDefender, Libra Esva and SpamTitan, all of which demonstrated very high spam catch rates while not misclassifying any of the 2,000+ legitimate emails sent during the testing period.
VB’s Anti-spam Test Director Martijn Grooten said: "Spammers are
constantly changing their emails to make them look more legitimate and to ensure their emails are delivered, so for a
product to block all but a few spam messages is no trivial
achievement. However, end-users will still be frustrated if
their anti-spam solution blocks legitimate email. Therefore,
products such as these that combine a high spam catch rate with
a zero false positive rate deserve full praise."
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). The three front-runners in
this test can clearly be seen from their positions on the
quadrant at
http://www.virusbtn.com/vbspam/charts/vbspam-chart0111-pr.jpg
.
Having a large set of spam emails that has been processed by 20
different anti-spam solutions also allows VB’s testers to look
at the differences between spam messages that are easy to filter
(those blocked by all, or all but one product) and those that
are more difficult to filter. This month’s test showed that the
latter group contains a significantly larger portion of plain
text messages - while the total corpus contained less than one
third plain text messages, well over half of the
’difficult-to-filter spam’ was in plain text format. Messages
containing HTML, on the other hand, proved to be significantly
easier to filter.
The bimonthly VBSpam tests use two live spam streams and a
stream of legitimate emails. The mail is sent to all the
products participating in the test in parallel, 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.
