Midgley's Info - ChoiceMail versus Qurb

There are two particularly well established players i'm going to focus on - ChoiceMail One from DigiPortal Software and Qurb which has now been acquired by Computer Associates and re-branded as CA Anti-SPAM.

The main difference between the two is Choicemail exists as a separate password protected (if required) application a bit like your firewall AND supports a number of different e-mail clients. Qurb/CA anti-SPAM on the other hand, is integrated into Outlook simply delivering SPAM to a "Qurb" folder for review.

If you're an Outlook user, I doubt you would go that far wrong with either product but my personal view is ChoiceMail has the edge in configurability and features - which means you'll hardly ever have to look at it anyway.

I don't think the Outlook integration Qurb offers is as much of a benefit as some other reviewers appear to. In fact I see it as a flaw if you wish to keep offensive SPAM well away from your e-mail client (and for example, your children). It does however mean that CA anti-SPAM is less likely to cause a system conflict with anti-virus products you may have running.

ChoiceMail features are summarised below:

Locking offensive and potentially dangerous SPAM away in a separate password protected (if required) application as ChoiceMail does is undoubtedly a plus point, and there is a "safe" previewer in there too which won't allow any nasties to run.
Eventhough ChoiceMail is whitelist based, it comes with a comprehensive set of common-sense anti-SPAM rules of its own which filter a significant amount of SPAM straight into a "junk" folder within the application. This makes reviewing whats left a doddle.
ChoiceMail's challenge process is very robust - requiring you to click on a link in the challenge e-mail to go to a WEB page at DigiPortal and copy across a code presented on screen (a bit like sites such as Yahoo use to stop automated registering by spam-bots) and provide a reason for wanting to contact you. Digiportal then relay the authentication request to you for approval. SPAM bots simply can't cope with this process.
Most SPAM comes from spoofed e-mail addresses which don't exist if you were to reply to them (which is what the challenge process is doing of course) and whitelist products are smart enough to filter out resulting non-deliveries. But what of those SPAM accounts which DO exist? This is playing into the spammers hands as you are confirming your account is active by challenging and you'll simply get MORE of it. At the end of the day, it is YOUR bandwidth SPAM uses up regardless of how effective a whitelist product is. Because of the way the challenge process works via a link in the e-mail to DigiPortal, your source address in the challenge e-mail doesn't need to be your real e-mail address. I like that.
I also like the rules which can be configured in ChoiceMail to still permit certain content regardless of the originator. Thats good news for business users and users of services like e-bay.
With the full retail version, you have the ability to create a number of "virtual" e-mail addresses you can give out to companies/mail-lists whom you may not trust with your genuine address. This is much easier than (say)registering at Yahoo or Hotmail for disposable mail boxes. Digiportal will relay messages to you and they will go through approved to your inbox.
If you already have WEBmail accounts from Yahoo Hotmail etc. ChoiceMail can be setup to manage those too.

My advice is to take a look at both, but spend more time exploring ChoiceMail thoroughly so you can understand just what it's capable of. It's the real big-hitter of the two in my opinion.

NIGGLES

Choicemail has a couple of minor ones:

1. The service seems to take longer to start than I would expect at bootup.

2. There may be conflict (and resulting odd e-mail behaviour/lock-ups/timouts) with some anti-virus products, because it is also looking at e-mails BEFORE they hit your mail client.

Sometimes it can be enough to simply turn off the e-mail checking component of the anti-virus product (this won't weaken your protection significantly anyway) but Choicemail gets around the problem by having the ability to change the port numbers used for the connection between Outlook and Choicemail too. I've had to do this when I used to run Norton, and also when I saw the light and dumped it for Kaspersky.

From the ChoiceMail Admin Control panel, server settings (Fig 1), I'm running SMTP on port 26 instead of 25 (Fig 2), and Pop3 on port 111 instead of port 110 (Fig 3). You need to match these for each e-mail client account (Fig 4 showing Outlook) as these accounts are talking to Choicemail and not directly to your ISP's mail server anymore.