About.com Rating

The Bottom Line

Matador Spam Fighter is a really simple and really effective learning junk mail filter for Outlook. Easy to train, precise and integrating well with Outlook, it's a pity that Matador Spam Fighter works reliably only with POP accounts.
Matador Spam Fighter is no longer available.

Pros

• Matador Spam Fighter detects spam with high precision
• Working seamlessly and integrating well with Outlook, Matador Spam Fighter is easy to use

• Matador Spam Fighter comes with an initial corpus of spam, but training is easy and encouraged

Cons

• Matador Spam Fighter does not work reliably and only manually with IMAP accounts
• Mail retrieval is slowed down quite a bit by Matador Spam Fighter
• Matador Spam Fighter only works with Outlook 2003

Description

• Matador Spam Fighter is a junk mail filter for Outlook.
• Scanning incoming mail as it arrives, Matador Spam Fighter also lets you clean any folder manually.
• Matador Spam Fighter uses a learning Bayesian filter and comes with initial spam data.
• Junk mail detected by Matador Spam Fighter is moved to the "Junk E-mail" folder.
• Detailed statistics about Matador Spam Fighter's performance are available.
• Matador Spam Fighter supports Windows 2000/3/XP and Outlook 2003, requires the .Net framework.

Guide Review - Matador Spam Fighter 1.0 - Outlook Spam Filtering Add-On

The simpler, the better. An "Is Spam" button for junk mail that makes it to your Outlook Inbox and a "Not Spam" button for good mail that was mistakenly filtered to the "Junk E-mail" folder by Matador Spam Fighter, that's all it takes to easily tame email.

Since Matador Spam Fighter comes with an initial corpus of spam and suggests to train with your Inbox' content when you first run it, even those two buttons are rarely needed. If you have lots of mail, the initial training can take long, and the pre-set corpus is inherently not ideal (because it is not your spam), but Matador Spam Fighter learns fast and performs just as well if you skip the Inbox training, delete the spam seed and rely on on-the-job training.

With such great results so easy to achieve, it's a pity that Matador Spam Fighter worked reliably only with POP accounts for me. You can scan any folder with Matador Spam Fighter, but it had some problems with IMAP accounts, for example. Due to its Bayesian nature, Matador Spam Fighter can also get a bit slow and memory-hungry after it has been trained with lots of mail, but that should normally not be a problem.