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Cloudmark SpamNet (for Outlook), ; free beta, paid final release coming soon

SpamNet wants you to participate in the war on spam. Though Cloudmark's Outlook plug-in (free beta for now, with the for-pay final release coming soon) isn't the most efficient spam fighter--it caught less than 70 percent of the spam in our test--it's elegantly designed and easy to use. Unlike other tools, SpamNet uses peer-to-peer technology and an army of users to fight spam.

Here's how it works: At installation, SpamNet inserts a toolbar, containing two buttons (Block and Unblock) and a short drop-down menu, below Outlook's standard toolbar. When you download your mail, SpamNet scans each message and assigns it a unique digital "fingerprint" based on data it pulls from the message. The program then goes online to check Cloudmark's massive spam database; if a junk e-mail you've received has already been fingerprinted, SpamNet shunts the offending message to a Spam folder.

When SpamNet misses a piece of spam, you simply highlight the message and click the Block button; SpamNet sends the fingerprint of that message to the database and moves the mail to your Spam folder. Cloudmark's servers even analyze the e-mail you block to determine how trustworthy a spam fighter you are (otherwise, spammers could trip up the system with fake submissions). As you continue to accurately identify spam, Cloudmark gives more weight to your submissions when updating its filters.

But all this peer-to-peering makes for slow spam busting; SpamNet took more than 30 minutes to analyze our full e-mail sample. It snagged 66 percent of the junk out of the box, with only three genuine messages incorrectly caught. We dutifully forwarded 214 messages and tried again, but the score didn't improve a whit; the system hadn't updated because it didn't trust our opinions yet.

There's something tremendously appealing about ganging up on spammers, and SpamNet is supremely easy to work with, but IHateSpam provides better protection for Outlook users.

IHateSpam for Outlook 3.2, , $20

IHateSpam for Outlook Express 3.2, ,$20

Sunbelt Software's IHateSpam can integrate with more than one e-mail client. But while its Outlook implementation is excellent and easily wins our nod for top spam trapper, the Outlook Express version is a little rough around the edges.

In both clients, the program installs a toolbar that lets you change filtering settings, flag spam that it missed, tattle on spammers to their ISPs, and manage blacklists ("enemies") and so-called whitelists ("friends"). Beyond that, however, the versions differ significantly.

In Outlook, IHateSpam downloads all your e-mail to your in-box, scans it, and moves suspected spam into a Quarantined Mail folder. When the program misses spam, you can select a bunch of messages at once and click the Is Spam button to quarantine them. The program sends portions of each message back to Sunbelt Software, which uses them to update its filters. Adding a sender to your friends or enemies list is equally easy.

But the Outlook Express plug-in isn't as smooth. In Express, IHateSpam marks suspect messages as read and moves them into your Deleted Items folder. As a result, you can too easily miss legitimate mail that gets caught by mistake. Marking mail as spam or adding friends and enemies is more work, too; you must select each message individually and move it to a folder or delete it manually.

Both versions nabbed more junk straight out of the box than any other program--around 95 percent. After some tweaking, the Outlook version improved to 98 percent, but the Outlook Express version still rejected some mail from our friends and accepted a few messages from our enemies. We also found the Outlook Express version unstable and buggy.

Sunbelt is the only antispam vendor that offers toll-free phone support; we called and were connected with a human immediately. And at $20 its software is also the cheapest. That price, combined with the program's ease of use and top-notch performance, makes IHateSpam a no-brainer for Outlook users. But Outlook Express fans should probably opt for SpamKiller--at least until a better version of IHateSpam for OE comes along.

Spamnix for Eudora, , $30

Fine-tuning the filtering in Spamnix for Eudora took us some time. Once we finished, though, we found the spam blocker easy to use and effective.

Spamnix analyzes each message and assigns points for traits like forged headers that obscure the actual source of the mail (1.5 points) or subjects that start with the word Free (0.3 points); mail that exceeds a certain number of points gets sent to the Spamnix folder. Open an exiled piece of spam, and you'll find a brief report at the bottom of the message detailing why Spamnix blocked it, along with the occasional snarky comment ("'Risk free'. Suuurreeee....").

The bad news? If you get a lot of junk e-mail, creating filters will prove time-consuming. When Spamnix misses a piece of spam, you have to open the message to create a filter for that sender's address or domain, then manually delete the e-mail. (According to Spamnix reps, Eudora doesn't let plug-ins perform these operations automatically.) Other programs let you select spam in bunches, then filter and delete them automatically.

Spamnix caught 66 percent of the spam on our first try. After we made filters and lowered the program's spam threshold (from 5 points to 3), it got about 99 percent of the junk--the best performance of any utility we tested--with only 11 false positives (real e-mail incorrectly tagged).

Though Spamnix required too much tweaking for our tastes, it's still our pick for Eudora users simply because an integrated spam filter is preferable to a stand-alone one. By the time you read this, Spamnix should have a version that plugs into Outlook, which could make it a worthy competitor to IHateSpam.