SpamFighter restore to Outlook

[Gene Robinson]

My Outlook was crashing and gave me an error message that it would remove
SpamFighter to improve performance. How can I get it restored?

 

[DL]

If the plugin was causing an outlook problem why would you want to re enable
it?

 

[VanguardLH]

My Outlook was crashing and gave me an error message that it would remove
SpamFighter to improve performance. How can I get it restored?

Get a version that works with your UNIDENTIFIED version of Outlook. If they
don't have a compatible version of their add-in, don't use it. They also
have their own "community" (aka forum) where you can ask about its use.
From a couple posts that I saw there, this product is not guaranteed to work
in pre-2007 versions of Outlook when using Windows 7.

Some of their points about the product include:

SPAMfighter Standard
This is a free product and can only be used in homes and schools. In
SPAMfighter Standard, a short text ad is displayed in your e-mail client,
and an "I'm protected by SPAMfighter" message is attached as a footer to
your outgoing e-mails.

Oh yeah, an anti-spam solution that itself spamifies your outbound e-mails.
Sure, those folks receiving your e-mails really think that spam isn't spam,
uh huh. Appending this spam crap to your e-mails makes you look amateurish
(like the boobs that let their anti-virus software append the "Gee, this
e-mail is safe. I promise." stupidity onto their outbound e-mails). The
result is you ARE SPAMMING by volunteering to be their spamming affiliate.

If you use the free (Standard) version, you are using an anti-spam product
that itself is generating spam. With every one of your outbound e-mails,
YOU are spamming!

Award winning spam filter technology

But which is never defined or even overviewed. When I see that
non-descriptive description, my first suspicion is that is just another
snowjob to hide they are using a Bayesian filter: a guessing scheme based on
historical statistics of keywords. Microsoft also likes to hide that they
included a Bayesian filter in Outlook by expending a paragraph, or two,
describing the advantages of their Junk filter. They don't want it known
that it is just another Bayes scheme (but where the user has little input to
the database and instead Microsoft downloads a "generic" database update
based on a sampling database across many users rather than on YOUR specific
e-mail history).

Then I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamfighter. Geez, another of
these voting schemes. SpamNet (now CloudMark) was the same way. This type
of filtering only works if you are NOT in the first batch of recipients that
get the spam. The first batch of victims get to vote on whether or not an
e-mail is spam. If they vote it is spam, a connection is required back to
the spam provider's server to update their database (so some information
about your e-mails *is* getting sent elsewhere but often as a hash value but
hashes are NOT unique). So the first batch of victims get to vote and help
OTHER recipients of the same e-mail. That means you have to NOT poll your
e-mail accounts very often because you are hoping someone else in your
community of voters already got afflicted with the spam and enough of those
users voted the same way to mark it as spam. If you poll your accounts
frequently, YOU become the volunteer that helps OTHERS but you still get the
spam (because it has not yet been voted upon). Everytime I've trialed a
spam service that relied on voting by users of their product, the spam
filtering wasn't very good both because I was polling my e-mails faster than
the votes were coming in and because users make for lousy voters since they
vote against unwanted e-mails versus voting against what actually qualifies
as spam.

If you want to be on the front line as a spam reporter, you are satisfied by
this type of spam filtering. You get to vote to help OTHERS not see that
spam e-mail. Otherwise, you have to hope that the spam isn't fresh and that
a sufficient number of other front-liners have already voted so you don't
see the spam e-mail.

Blacklist domains and emails

This means you get to add your own. It does NOT mean that you get to employ
the public blacklists of known spam sources, like the blacklists afforded by
Spamhaus and SpamCop.

Unique picture filter that can recognize spam which is sent as a picture

You can do that yourself by defining a rule in Outlook that looks for the
content-type header. No 3rd party software is required.

Protects all the email accounts on your PC

Not possible if your e-mail client is making SSL connects to the e-mail
server. Since the traffic is encrypted, the proxy used by this program
cannot interrogate it.

Unique language filtering tool that empowers you to stop emails written in
specific languages

That feature already exists in Outlook 2003/2007.

Privacy Guaranteed - we don't see any of your email

That in itself is a red flag. They would never have to make that
declaration if NONE of your e-mail traffic went through any of their
servers. This is the same kind of "promise" made by Incredimail and other
e-mail products where some unknown list of "statistics" is sent to their
e-mail servers (but then the mechanism exists to transfer anything in your
e-mails to them).

I'm sure there are some advantages to using Spamfighter -- as long as you
can past that its free (Standard) version will spamify ALL your outbound
e-mails. Perhaps you chose to pay for their Pro version that eliminates
using you as their spamming affiliate.