Spamato works directly with Thunderbird, Mozilla, and Outlook and can be setup as a proxy for almost any email client. The software is platform independent. You can use Spamato whether you are a user of Windows, Mac, or Linux.
I am using the Thunderbird extension which was very easy to install. There was no configuration required other than adding two buttons to the tool bar. There is one check you need to make to be sure the application can find your Java install, but it is simple and well explained.
As email is received it is checked by Spamato using six different filtering methods. Any messages that Spamato classifies as spam are moved to the Spamato folder which is created during the install. If anything is mistakenly determined to be spam you should click the non-spam (also known as ham) button to help train the filters. Conversely, if spam messages are missed by Spamato you click the spam button to the application what you consider to be spam.
Before any training, I found Spamato to have about an 85 percent accuracy in marking spam and about a five percent false positive rate. After about two days of use and correcting all of Spamato's mistakes the accuracy is about 98 percent with about a one percent false positive rate. I expect those numbers to improve over the next few days of training the filters. Most of my email accounts are also filtered at the server level, so my spam load is already fairly low. That also mean that most of the spam I get is the stuff that is difficult to filter.
The performance of Spamato is already much better than the Thunderbird Bayesian filter. I turned off the native Thunderbird filter since it is redundant and makes it harder to train Spamato. I would say even if it were not free, Spamato would be an excellent product. I couldn't imagine a spam filter as sophisticated as Spamato being any easier to setup and use. If you do have any trouble getting Spamato up and running you can visit their Spamato help forum.
