Rating: 
Summary: Awful, awful, awful.
Review: Absolutely no support of a piece of junk software. All other reviews except one are right on the money. Waste of money, waste of time and frustrating to now understand there is no way to stop the endless steam of idiotic spammers and purveyors on the net. Don't buy this one, you'll just lose a lot of time trying to make it do what you think it should do.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the money or time to install
Review: After getting over 50 spam messages a day, I decided to purchase McAfee's Spam Killer - it was highly rated by PC Magazine. Unfortunately, after installing I have found that it is faster to remove the spam by hand. First, SpamKiller is s-l-o-w. I have a 1GHz computer with 700MB of RAM. Yet, it still took SpamKiller a little more than a day (26 hours) to process 1000 email messages. Plus, SpamKiller takes another three to five minutes to filter every new message sent to me. What's the end result, SpamKiller runs all the time. My CPU is peaked by running SpamKiller. Please don't waste your time with SpamKiller. There has to be a better solution.
Rating: 
Summary: Note: Spamkiller 4 & Spamkiller 5 are different
Review: After trying several times to install MSK ver 4.0 on my new XP machine at home without success I had no other alternative but to spend the $39 USD and buy a "per issue" Tech Help Session.
I phoned the number they gave me and got someone to help me (somewhat of a trainee c/w supervisor's support). We worked through a few things and after 50 minutes with no success they informed me bluntly that MSK Ver.4 was NOT compatible with XP! Now it says right on the box that it is! The tech support person then gave me a number to call for a refund. I tried that and three other numbers before reaching a sales agent that told me I had to get my refund from Amazon.ca where I bought it. Amazon gives no refunds for software, package intact or not! They simply do not refund any software! I called McAfee back and finally someone processed my refund for the $39USD support session but had to pass me on to a Texas sales person to try to get a refund for the software. He told me that McAfee couldn't give me a refund because I didn't buy it from them. I told them about Amazon.ca's no software refund policy and they still wouldn't budge. I then told them that they have to take responsibility for the fact that they misrepresented this software to Amazon and the public(MSK ver.4 ok for XP printed right on the box) and that I was caught in the middle. He then said he would take the issue to his supervisor and get back to me. I've never heard from them since. That was the 5th of September. I would warn anyone operating Windows XP to refrain from purchasing MSK ver.4. There is a ver.5 which probably does work with XP BUT, I'm not sure about this either.
Sincerly dissappointed,
Ed Vallee
Rating:
Summary: AOL
Review: All I can say is that it doesn't work with AOL, so if that's what you're buying it for, save your time.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of money
Review: Being deluged with spam (daily ~ 30), I thought this might be a good utility to have. Was a total waste of money and time. The security center was totally annoying and kept popping up until I manually disabled it using msconfig. And configuring the tool for any other mail program other than outlook express is a pain. Besides, if you have already opened the mail program *before* the spamkiller, there's not much spam killing you can do. Finally uninstalled and just wrote some outlook rules to filter out everything but known e-mail addresses. Recently installed norton internet security, and it seems to have a much more sensible spam blocking option.
Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time with it!
Review: First of all, it only blocked 60% of the junk emails. not a good batting average by any standards. It's very hard to use. Takes forever to delete or block a message. Why? I'm using DSL, connection speed is pretty consistent. Tech support is no help what so ever. For couple days I didn't have any message. at first I thought maybe it's the ISP. Then I remembered I can check my email online. Turn out Spam Killer is not working for some reason. Maybe too much junk mails. I cleaned up the mailbox and Spam killer worked again. The last thing pushed me over the cliff is the program will delete everything in the accepted email folder when I simply asking it to delete or block one message. An error will come up and then everything is gone. Deleted the thing from my computer, now everything is back to normal. I can live with the spam, can't stand this POS!
Rating:
Summary: junk
Review: firstly this product self installs mcafee security center, it will not install without it and cannot be removed and have spamkiller still function. there are hundreds of people on the mcaffee "support forum" (more on this below) asking hwo to get rid of security center. In a supreme irony Security center will generate popups all the time, meaning mcafee installs an unremovable program that spams you! the support is just surreal. no mater what question you ask you by mail or "live chat" get a form reply that says, in short: "we didn't read your question, so here is an answer to something else, hopefully you will know better than to bother us next time" so people go to the support forums. here you never find a mcafee technition, but simply "forum administrators, who also never answer a question. also the filters, very important for adapting to ever changing spamsubjects and methods, are rearely updated. I am still wating for keyword cialis which replaced viagra six monhths ago in spams! this program will also not support filtering long messages. others here have mentioned it. since spammers are aware of this it can and is easily defeated on this front. there is an option to filter long messages but it doesn't work. moreover mcafee knows it doesnt. the one straight answer I got from mcafee was that long messaging filters didnt work with some providers. which? Comcast, verizon, earthlink and all the rest of the large providers...lol.
Rating:
Summary: junk
Review: firstly this product self installs mcafee security center, it will not install without it and cannot be removed and have spamkiller still function. there are hundreds of people on the mcaffee "support forum" (more on this below) asking hwo to get rid of security center. In a supreme irony Security center will generate popups all the time, meaning mcafee installs an unremovable program that spams you! the support is just surreal. no mater what question you ask you by mail or "live chat" get a form reply that says, in short: "we didn't read your question, so here is an answer to something else, hopefully you will know better than to bother us next time" so people go to the support forums. here you never find a mcafee technition, but simply "forum administrators, who also never answer a question. also the filters, very important for adapting to ever changing spamsubjects and methods, are rearely updated. I am still wating for keyword cialis which replaced viagra six monhths ago in spams! this program will also not support filtering long messages. others here have mentioned it. since spammers are aware of this it can and is easily defeated on this front. there is an option to filter long messages but it doesn't work. moreover mcafee knows it doesnt. the one straight answer I got from mcafee was that long messaging filters didnt work with some providers. which? Comcast, verizon, earthlink and all the rest of the large providers...lol.
Rating:
Summary: GREAT filtering, but problems
Review: Good: This gets rid of nearly all spam. I get about 400 spams a day on my public account (the one that I give to merchants and web sites). SpamKiller lets through about 10 of these, and hasn't killed a "real" message in quite a while. Now, this program requires you to deal with the spam that DOES get through, if you want to keep up with the spammers, who constantly change their methods. In particular, the text and subject filter lists need to be added to regularly, so that new misspellings of "Viagra" or new spam topics are caught. If you don't do this, say weekly, then the amount of spam that gets through will increase. McAfee does a RELLY BAD JOB of updating its own lists. After about a year of use, I find that my own filters that I've added are FAR more likely to catch spam than the rather lame filters that ship with the product. However, one has to review this product in comparison to the others on the market, most of which are totally useless. SpamKiller is better than most shareware, and MUCH better than Outlook Express's address-based filter. VERY GOOD: There are a wide array of filters available. FROM, TO, domain, username, other headers, message content, etc. Alone or in combination. Certain tests on sender names, such as "too many numbers in username", "username starts with number" kill most of the AOL and Hotmail forgeries that Outlook Express (with our without "Ihatespam") cannot stop. Other tests catch messages that are routed through, say, Russia or other places that legitimate mail probably wont come from. One has to remember that this is a tool. You have to add your own brainpower to make it work for you. If you are looking for a magic bullet, you will be looking for a VERY LONG time. Bad: Poor integration with email programs. What you really want is something that is invoked when you run your email program, as an intermediary "pull-through filter" or "proxy." SpamKiller runs independently on a timed basis, and if it hasn't run between the time that the spam arrived in your mailbox, and the time you run,say, Outlook Express, then the spam comes through. However, this seems to be a limitation of Outlook Express. The upside to this is that Spamkiller will work with ANY windows mail program equally (except AOL, which uses non-standard methods). It also has issues with IMAP, but that's a basic IMAP problem. IMAP is the spammer's friend. Also bad: As another reviewer points out, SpamKiller installs McAfee Security Center to run in your icon tray on startup, you cannot turn it off with normal methods, and it runs as a scheduled task. If you kill it out of scheduled tasks, it will reinstall itself there each reboot. (One actually has to edit it out of the Registry RUN section to get rid of it, but that is NOT something most users should attempt.) Besides the unwanted wake-ups this causes, it also tends to generate toolbar pop-up baloons that look a lot like spam themselves. I would rate Spamkiller a FIVE if this "feature" was missing. McAfee needs to fire someone. So, the Spam-checking and deleting features work VERY WELL. THe installation is pretty good, and the help screens also contain all the common questions. BUT the program has an intrusive marketing add-on. This could be improved GREATLY if McAfee removed the intrusive "Security Center" marketing app. Another improvement would be to integrate it tightly into Outlook/Outlook Express and Messenger, but nobody else can do that with all this functionality, so I won't mark off for that. Won't work for AOL of course...but that's AOL's fault, as usual. Will work with Hotmail or MSN, if you use the POP3 version of those. No spam checker will work for webmail.
Rating:
Summary: Hopelessly confusing and ineffective
Review: Has there ever been a program so obtuse and frustrating to use as SpamKiller? What a horrible waste of time to try to make this work. When McAfee purchased DeerSoft and their wonderful Spam Assassin Pro system, I purchased the McAffe program assuming it was Spam Assassin Pro. It isn't. This is pure rubish.
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