I've been using the Internet since 1995 and have been using the same email address since 1999. Spam isn't just an annoyance for me, it's a way of life. Spam has become so pervasive that programs are available that allow users like you and me to rid ourselves of spam and to, as MailFrontier so eloquently puts it, make email good again.

MailFrontier's anti-spam packages are absolutely outstanding. For the purposes of this review, we took a look at their Desktop package aimed at end-users (home consumers, small business users, individual employees) called Matador.

Matador accurately identifies spam and fraudulent emails and moves them to a special folder in the user's email software (Outlook and Outlook Express are currently the only email clients that Matador supports). In use in our labs, Matador successfully identified all spam and only the smallest number of false positives (good email that is accidentally identified as spam).

The spam folder Matador creates is easy to navigate, and its extremely simple interface of having "Junk" and "Not Junk" buttons at the top of the client make it very easy to identify new email as spam or remove false positives from the spam folder.

In addition to all of its very accurate spam-identifying capabilities, Matador has the ability to identify fraudulent emails. Since the advent of eBay, the online auction site, and Paypal, eBay's credit card acceptance system, there has been a huge rise in evildoers (for lack of a better name) trying to steal identities from unsuspecting eBay users through an activity called "Phishing."

Phishing is the name given to the act of sending an email to someone that looks EXACTLY like an email from an official company (such as eBay or Paypal) but, in reality, will send all data back to an unknown source. These emails often ask users to enter their ebay username and password and then request all kinds of identifying characteristics including social security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account and routing numbers, pin numbers, and more. The problem is that these emails look just like the ones that come from the official sources and are very hard to discern. No more worries, though, Matador takes care of them for you and will even report the sources to government organizations that will eventually track down the evildoers and stop them in their tracks (we hope).

Matador is an excellent piece of software. It's ease-of-use and splendid features (like the reports function that will track how much spam you receive on a daily basis and give you totals) make it the best solution for spam removal on the market today. Except for a few false positives that came from online e-businesses, it has a nearly flawless record and because of this, we gae it a nearly flawless review.

MailFrontier's "Matador" Desktop is available directly from MailFrontier's website for $29.95.

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