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Journalism of Courage
Most e-mail programs Outlook, Entourage and so on have built-in spam filters. Unfortunately, they8217;re no match for the spammers8217; evolving efforts to disguise their messages as legitimate mail8212;or example, by using idiotic spellings for words like mortgage and Viagra.
In two weeks, you8217;ll have a new, very unusual anti-spam option: the Spam Cube spamcube.com. It8217;s a plastic cube four inches on a side, available in white, black, silver, pink or yellow. It8217;s one of the first anti-spam hardware appliances for individuals8212;and one that requires no monthly fee.
Why would a hardware approach be more attractive than a software or Web-based one? There8217;s no software to install, troubleshoot or update. That8217;s especially handy if you have several computers in your house; because it sits so far upstream in the network, the Cube screens e-mail before it even reaches the computers, without risk of adding complexity or sluggishness to your Macs or PCs.
The Spam Cube sure looks good on paper. The big question is, How well does it work? Right out of the box, it8217;s lethal to spam. In one week, 579 pieces of spam flowed into my e-mail accounts and the Spam Cube correctly identified all but 16 as spam. Unfortunately, it also flagged 90 legitimate messages as spam or phishing messages.
On the Spam Cube8217;s control panel, which is a page you can view in your Web browser, you can tone down its aggressiveness. Once set to Aggressive instead of Very Aggressive, it was less skeptical of e-mail from friends and colleagues. But it also failed to flag any phishing messages at all, much to the probable delight of several eBay and Chase Bank impostors. The company says that at the outset, the Spam Cube ought to achieve 90 to 95 percent accuracy 8212; and over time, accuracy will improve to 98 percent. Clearly, that wasn8217;t my experience, although of course my Cube didn8217;t have the benefit of other people8217;s accumulated input, because the product isn8217;t yet on the market.
