Editors' Rating
Published: 29 Mar 2005
In our opinion, the anti-spam program Qurb 3.0 (pronounced 'curb') easily beats Norton AntiSpam 2005 and McAfee SpamKiller 6.0 and provides serious competition for our current favourite, MailFrontier Desktop. Qurb exceeds MailFrontier in spam-fighting effectiveness, blocking nearly all the junk inside Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. It also offers a better interface for reviewing blocked mail, unique tools for fighting phishing scams, and a great Outlook email search tool. But Qurb also trapped more legitimate email than MailFrontier and required more care and feeding. That said, Qurb ($29.95 -- about £16 -- for a single licence) is a very close second to MailFrontier, and is also recommended.
We found Qurb's setup both quick and easy. Qurb installs a toolbar inside Outlook and Outlook Express and scans your email as it downloads. Email from anyone not on your Outlook contact list or approved list gets shunted to a quarantine folder for you to review or delete. Qurb also allows you to issue a challenge email to new senders, who must respond before their email is delivered to you. As with MailFrontier, the challenge feature is set to be off by default. And like MailFrontier, Qurb will block email created using foreign-language character sets.
Whenever you inspect the contents of the Qurb quarantine folder within Outlook, the program opens a pop-up window that displays the folder's contents with tools to redirect legitimate mail blocked by mistake. Passing your mouse over any entry allows you to read the first few lines of each message, helping you to separate the spam from legitimate email without having to open it. Like MailFronter, Qurb automatically moves the not-spam-designated messages to your Inbox and adds those addresses to your approved list so that they won't get blocked again.
Unlike MailFrontier, Qurb offers a potential solution for email spoofing. Its unique Domain Verification tool checks whether the originating IP address matches the email address in the From field, so you can be confident that email came from, say, eBay and not some phisher in Belarus trying to steal your credit card number. However, only a handful of companies currently publish their IP addresses, so the feature will be inactive much of the time. Perhaps as more companies comply, this tool might become an effective weapon against phishing attacks.
Qurb also includes a lightning-fast search tool for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express that runs rings around Microsoft's own pitiful search features. The tool rummages through all your messages, contacts, appointments and notes. It won't decrease the spam you get, but it will save you time finding old messages.
Warning: at first, Qurb trapped nearly 100 percent of the junk email in our test account -- and a large number of legitimate messages. Over time, as we culled through the quarantine folder and added names to our approved senders list, however, the false positives dwindled to almost nothing. Your experience will vary, of course.
Another drawback: Qurb offers fewer configuration options than MailFrontier. For example, Qurb won't block adult-content spam and allow just casino Web site spam. With Qurb, it's block all or nothing.
Support for Qurb is limited to online FAQs, user forums, and a Web-based email form. We submitted a question and received a helpful response in about seven hours, better than most software companies these days. MailFrontier offers telephone support only for its business customers.
You can download a trial version of Qurb here.
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