For the past 12 days, I have been evaluating a free trial of Computer Associates’ Qurb anti-spam, anti-phishing filter for Outlook/Outlook Express. The need for third-party software for handling spam was necessitated by the requirement (by SpamCop) that we disable challenge reponse on our mail server, or face prolonged blacklisting.

There are a lot of options out there. I tested some free versions or open-source clients that managed spam locally, but none of them worked quite like I would have expected. Qurb, however, has been easy to use, easy to configure, and makes short work of dealing with spam.

Qurb works much like a virus scanner. It puts suspected emails in a quarantine folder, and the user gets prompted from time to time to check the quarantine folder to review the messages. If every message is spam, you do nothing. If it catches some false positives, you click a checkbox and Qurb adds that sender to your whitelist, and click okay. That’s it. It works well. Even better than Outlook 2003’s built-in Junk Mail folder (which has to be disabled for Qurb to work most effectively).

It’s definitely worth checking out imho. Well worth the $30 registration.