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McAfee SpamKiller 4.0

McAfee SpamKiller 4.0

List Price: $29.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Works, but buggy, and support is lame
Review: This product does do what it says it does... it reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the amount of spam in your inbox, but you will probably have to put up with frequent glitches and errors (at least on Windows Me, which is what I've got).

I've encountered at least 4 different error messages and occasional crashes and McAfee support has not been helpful in resolving them, other than to tell me to reinstall the product (the support tech they admitted that they didn't have info on my specific error message.. so I guess "reinstall it" is just their blanket response to problems).

Beyond the errors, you will also have to put up with the supremely annoying McAfee security center, which is basically adware that McAfee requires you install along with spamkiller -- you can't have one without the other, and you can't make Security Center not show it's startup screen or taskbar icon. You can't even uninstall security center without also uninstalling spamkiller.

Overall, the product seems easy to use, though there are a few confusing things about the interface; for example, the taskbar icon state and its menu can show that mail filtering is active, when at the same time the main window will say the filtering is suspended -- according to the mcafee site this is intentional, though I thought it was a bug, and the tech I contacted couldn't really explain the reason for this behavior.

In summary, this product works, and is usable, but I think McAfee should have spent more time testing it before releasing it. Given their history of frequent updates to other software (e.g. VirusScan), I think they'll eventually fix the problems I found and then I would recommend the product wholeheartedly.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Not appropriate for laptops
Review: This software "gets rid" of spam by logging in to your POP3 account and looking for any spam-like messages. It then downloads the messages into the Spamkiller program so that you can review them. It also claims to send automatic complaints and error messages for every downloaded spam message that it loads. After you download your spam messages, you log in to your POP3 server again with your e-mail program, hopefully to find only real mail waiting for you there.

The software comes bundled inside the McAfee Security Center so that it is fully integrated with their other products. A huge problem with the security center is that it puts an automatic task into your task scheduler that tries to update the security center products automatically every 5 minutes, even waking the computer from power-off if necessary. Unfortunately, and unbelievably, these settings cannot be changed. If you try to change them or even delete the task, or even delete the task scheduler applet, when you restart the computer, the task appears again and continues to wake your computer every 5 minutes. This is not a good thing for laptops. I've fought with this for a week, and the technical support at McAfee was most unsympathetic. After having my battery drain down to zero yesterday following an important presentation in which error messages from the scheduler kept popping up every 5 minutes in my PowerPoint, I am totally fed up.

I've never been able to log-in to get updates anyway. Although I registered my software a week ago, McAfee hasn't added my customer name and password to their database to allow me to log in to their system. Again, their tech support services have not been any help with this. This leaves me quite dubious about any McAfee products.


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