I haven’t commented on Cloudmark’s Spamnet plug-in for Outlook (and now Outlook Express) in a while.

This product is just wonderful. If you are an Outlook user and you haven’t tried it yet, download Cloudmark’s Spamnet now.

Here are my spam stats for the last few months while using Cloudmark:

Total messages received — 59,359

Total number of spam messages — 52,113

Total spam caught by Cloudmark — 50452 (97% success rate)

Total spam missed by Cloudmark — 1,661

Total “real messages” — 5,585

Total “false positives” of messages from individuals — ZERO

Total “false positives” of messages from opt-in lists — 95 (<0.2%)

“Good Message Ratio” with Cloudmark — 77% (i.e. over 3/4 of the messages in my inbox are real messages).

Given that my “Good Message Ratio” without Cloudmark would be less than 10%, I can confidently say that Cloudmark has saved my inbox.

Note that many opt-in lists get caught by Cloudmark. That is because the software works collaboratively, taking other people’s “block” messages and blocking similar messages from everyone’s inbox. But the software allows you to “double unblock” or whitelist messages so that they always get through Spamnet regardless of what other people think of the sender.